 Okay guys, it's new video card review time again, so we're going to be taking a look in this video at the 1080p performance of the all-new GeForce GTX 670 from Nvidia. So you can see here I've actually got a variety of GTX 670s, most of which I did unboxings of already. So you can see I've got a few reference cards. This one's factory overclocked. This one's not. This one's a direct Nvidia card. I've got them set up with a 3-way SLI bridge, so that's a bit of a hint of what one of my other videos is going to be about. I've also got a non-reference card, so this is with a dual-slot cooler. This one's going to be cool because it's going to go head-to-head against a Sapphire HD7950 that has a similarly designed cooler so we can take a look at them, you know, which one has more coil wine or less coil wine, which one has the better cooling solution since Galaxy and Sapphire are both key partners for Nvidia and AMD respectively. This will be a really interesting head-to-head because these are similarly priced products. Now in terms of the overall mix, I'm not testing a ton of games today, guys, and I apologize for that, but honestly I just am a little bit constrained in terms of what I can do right now. So I'm going to be doing Crysis 2, Battlefield 3 Skyrim, and Witcher 2, and this is the selection of cards that I'm going to be taking a look at. We're going to be looking at the 1080p performance, and then I'm going to have a separate video where I'm also going to cover things like the physical power and noise. I'm going to take a look at 3D vision performance compared to the last generation GTX 570 that this new 670 replaces. We're going to do an OC guide, seeing what kind of performance we can get compared to a 680, as well as, oh yeah, there it is, there's that hint there for the SLI scaling video. Now before I go any further, yes, I covered this in the unboxings, but I just want to give you guys a brief overview. So the 670 is basically a slightly cut down version of the GTX 680. Nvidia has made fewer cuts than usual, however, because it still has the 256-bit memory interface with 6 GHz GDDR5. It only has some of the CUDA cores cut away and a slight reduction in clock speed, giving you, again, that slight performance reduction. Now you can see the reference cards are actually very short PCBs. So these are very power efficient. These are very cool running. They don't need beefy coolers. And you can see they only have dual 6-pin connectors, even though these are high-end graphics cards. This is cool too. This is some of the other sort of slight finishing touches that you see from the board partners. Galaxy's gone ahead and put a slightly different backplate on theirs. MSI has actually slightly adjusted the positioning of the slots compared to the reference one. And yeah. So let's get going, shall we? Now there are a couple critical details before we really get started, and that is test benches and the driver revisions that are being used. So for the GTX 670, I'm using the publicly available beta driver, 301.34, whereas for other Nvidia cards, I'm using 301.24. For all AMD cards, I'm using the latest 12.4 drivers. My test bench is a 4.4 GHz 3930K from Intel. So that is an overclocked processor with 16 gigs of Kingston HyperX RAM at DDR3 1600. I'm using a Gigabyte, what's it called, X79UD7 motherboard. This is sort of like the spiritual successor to their previous generation OC board. So that's going to allow me to run up to four graphics cards in SLI or Crossfire should the need arise. And then for boot drive, I'm using the Kronos Deluxe 120 gig, and for the power supply, the ZX 1250W 80 plus gold power supply from OCZ will be dealing with that side of things for cooling. I'm going to be using, come on, focus please, an H100, which will keep my processor at a reasonable temperature during all this testing. For Crysis 2, I'll be mixing things up a little bit. I'm going to be using the Ultra preset, since all of the cards that I am using are very high end cards. I still hate motion blur, so I'm keeping that on medium. And I'm going to be using high res textures this time around, once again, to try and strain these cards as much as I can. So I'm going to do this a little differently, and I'm going to go one game at a time in terms of the analysis. So here you can see the Crysis 2 1080p ultra performance. Here is the GTX 670, which puts in a very, very strong performance, because while the average frames per second are below the 7970, check this out, the actual minimum frame rate of the 670 was above the HD 7970. So that means that when you see a dip in the action, you're going to see pretty much the same dip with the 670 as with a 7970, which is outstanding. I mean, remember too, guys, you know, there's stuff that's sort of within margin of error here, but in general, that shows us that this is a very, very strong card. And when you compare it against its more similarly priced competitor, the 7950, the difference becomes much more pronounced. Although bear in mind, the 7950 is an outstanding overclocker, which will allow it to put some distance between itself and the 7870, which at stock speed, have, well, put it put on a pretty good show for this performance review as well. For Battlefield 3, I'll be doing my usual two minute run through in the comrades level in the parkade. And I will also be using Battlefield 3 to measure the maximum power draw as well as maximum noise and load temperatures of the GPUs. Now, yes, I realize these are not the maximum loads that I could create with this system, but I'm looking for a more realistic scenario. So what I'm going to do is I find a particular van in the parking lot when I'm done my run through and I shoot it until it starts smoking and some effects get going. And that's how I've been able to generate a pretty good peak power draw. And then I'm going to sit there and stare at it and get all of those stats before I close the game. Also for Battlefield 3, we will be running everything on Ultra. In Battlefield 3, the GTX 670 sits very comfortably with its competition, the 7950. Hold on, let me just move that cursor. So you can see that in terms of the average frame rate, it is quite a bit higher than the 7950 and even as competitive with the 7970, although when the action gets intense, you'll see a dip more like a 7950 as opposed to like a 7970. And it sits sort of exactly where you'd expect it to be behind its younger brother, the GTX 680. I think it should be noted that this is a huge generational leap in performance compared to the card that it's replacing. I mean these are staggering numbers and you'll continue to see that throughout the rest of this performance evaluation of this card. Once again, the 7870 puts on a pretty good show considering its price point though as well. For Skyrim, I'll be doing my usual two laps around the town of Whiterun and I will be using ultra presets which means everything, you know, all the view distances are at max and everything is pretty ultra and fabulous. Also I am using the stock high res texture pack. Now Battlefield 3 was a bit of an anomaly for me. Bear in mind guys, I mentioned this before, but I'm using a different driver on the GTX 670 than I am on the GTX 680. So I would expect that once the GTX 680 catches up in terms of the driver revisions that we're going to see a similar performance boost. However, what this basically means is that at launch, for all intents and purposes, the GTX 670 is the fastest card that I tested in Battlefield 3 which is no small matter. And I mean you can see how much ahead it is of even the HD 7970. So if you play Battlefield 3, the GTX 670 is going to be one of the cards on your shortlist I think. And once again, staggering performance improvement over the last generation GTX 570, almost a doubling of minimum FPS. The Witcher 2 is so demanding that I won't be altering my usual test setup so you guys can see here if my camera would ever focus exactly what I am using to test these cards. Bearing in mind of course this is at 1080p and I'm doing my usual run through which if you guys have seen it before then you know which run through I'm talking about and if you haven't then you don't. But it's pretty good, there's some combat, there's some trees, there's some buildings. Good stuff. The Witcher is such a demanding game and the settings that I'm running it at are just totally unreasonable even for modern high end cards. But it still gives you an idea of where everything stands so in terms of average FPS, the GTX 670 falls right in with the 7950, about where it's supposed to be. We saw a bit of a dip but something to note about the Witcher is that it tends to just kind of randomly hitch up and the frames just sort of tank unexpectedly sometimes. So I don't know how much you can really read into these minimum FPS. I think that would explain why they're all kind of around the same level. You know you can see the 7970 dips below even a 7950. So sort of take all of that with a grain of salt. For this one I would be more interested in the average FPS. And once again we see a sizable improvement over the previous generation and about an expected gap between the GTX 670 and the GTX 680. So just a couple subjective things. The GTX 680 exhibits a tiny bit of coil whine, better than the reference cards from the red team that I have in my testing suite and better than the GTX 680 that I have. But both the 680 and the 670 do make a little bit more noise than the last generation cards. The fan has a bit of a grinding noise to it. You can check out my other video on the noise temperatures and power consumption of this card. It is extremely efficient. So power consumption wise it is very similar to a GTX 570 but it offers dramatically better performance. And part of this may be the smaller PCB, I don't know. But a huge part of it is definitely the Kepler GPU that it's got going on in there. Remember this card is also available in 4GB configurations and if you're looking at running a giant resolution like a 2560x1440 or 2560x1600 monitor or 3 monitors in surround I would definitely look at picking up the 4GB version. So thank you for checking out my performance review of the GTX 670 from Nvidia. 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