NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 Review Feat. EVGA: Bringing GK104 Down To $400
by Ryan Smith on May 10, 2012 9:00 AM ESTIn a typical high-end GPU launch we’ll see the process take place in phases over a couple of months if not longer. The new GPU will be launched in the form of one or two single-GPU cards, with additional cards coming to market in the following months and culminating in the launch of a dual-GPU behemoth. This is the typical process as it allows manufacturers and board partners time to increase production, stockpile chips, and work on custom designs.
But this year things aren’t so typical. GK104 wasn’t the typical high-end GPU from NVIDIA, and neither it seems is there anything typical about its launch.
NVIDIA has not been wasting any time in getting their complete GK104 based product lineup out the door. Just 6 weeks after the launch of the GeForce GTX 680, NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 690, their dual-GK104 monster. Now only a week after that NVIDIA is at it again, launching the GK104 based GeForce GTX 670 this morning.
Like its predecessors, GTX 670 will fill in the obligatory role as a cheaper, slower, and less power-hungry version of NVIDIA’s leading video card. This is a process that allows NVIDIA to not only put otherwise underperforming GPUs to use, but to satisfy buyers at lower price points at the same time. Throughout this entire process the trick to successfully launching any second-tier card is to try to balance performance, prices, and yields, and as we’ll see NVIDIA has managed to turn all of the knobs just right to launch a very strong product.
| GTX 680 | GTX 670 | GTX 580 | GTX 570 | |
| Stream Processors | 1536 | 1344 | 512 | 480 |
| Texture Units | 128 | 112 | 64 | 60 |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 | 48 | 40 |
| Core Clock | 1006MHz | 915MHz | 772MHz | 732MHz |
| Shader Clock | N/A | N/A | 1544MHz | 1464MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1058MHz | 980MHz | N/A | N/A |
| Memory Clock | 6.008GHz GDDR5 | 6.008GHz GDDR5 | 4.008GHz GDDR5 | 3.8GHz GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit | 256-bit | 384-bit | 320-bit |
| VRAM | 2GB | 2GB | 1.5GB | 1.25GB |
| FP64 | 1/24 FP32 | 1/24 FP32 | 1/8 FP32 | 1/8 FP32 |
| TDP | 195W | 170W | 244W | 219W |
| Transistor Count | 3.5B | 3.5B | 3B | 3B |
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 40nm |
| Launch Price | $499 | $399 | $499 | $349 |
Like GeForce GTX 680, GeForce GTX 670 is based on NVIDIA’s GK104 GPU. So we’re looking at the same Kepler design and the same Kepler features, just at a lower level of performance. As always the difference is that since this is a second-tier card, NVIDIA is achieving that by harvesting otherwise defective GPUs.
In a very unusual move for NVIDIA, for GTX 670 they’re disabling one of the eight SMXes on GK104 and lowering the core clock a bit, and that’s it. GTX 670 will ship with 7 active SMXes, all 32 of GK104’s ROPs, and all 4 GDDR5 memory controllers. Typically we’d see NVIDIA hit every aspect of the GPU at once in order to create a larger performance gap and to maximize the number of GPUs they can harvest – such as with the GTX 570 and its 15 SMs & 40 ROPs – but not in this case.
Meanwhile clockspeeds turn out to be equally interesting. Officially, both the base clock and the boost clock are a fair bit lower than GTX 680. GTX 670 will ship at 915MHz for the base clock and 980MHz for the boost clock, which is 91MHz (9%) and 78MHz (7%) lower than the GTX 680 respectively. However as we’ve seen with GTX 680 GK104 will spend most of its time boosting and not necessarily just at the official boost clock. Taken altogether, depending on the game and the specific GPU GTX 670 has the capability to boost within 40MHz or so of GTX 680, or about 3.5% of the clockspeed of its more powerful sibling.
As for the memory subsystem, like the ROPs they have not been touched at all. GTX 670 will ship at the same 6.008GHz memory clockspeed of GTX 680 with the same 256-bit memory bus, giving it the same 192GB/sec of memory bandwidth. This is particularly interesting as NVIDIA has always turned down their memory clocks in the past, and typically taken out a memory controller/ROP combination in the past. Given that GK104 is an xx4 GPU rather than a full successor to GF110 and its 48 ROPs, it would seem that NVIDIA is concerned about their ROP and memory performance and will not sacrifice performance there for GTX 670.
Taken altogether, this means at base clocks GTX 670 has 100% of the memory bandwidth, 91% of the ROP performance, and 80% of the shader performance of GTX 680. This puts GTX 670’s specs notably closer to GTX 680 than GTX 570 was to GTX 580, or GTX 470 before it. In order words the GTX 670 won’t trail the GTX 680 by as much as the GTX 570 trailed the GTX 580 – or conversely the GTX 680 won’t have quite the same lead as the GTX 580 did.
As for power consumption, the gap between the two is going to be about the same as we saw between the GTX 580 and GTX 570. The official TDP of the GT 670 is 170W, 25W lower than the GTX 680. Unofficially, NVIDIA’s GPU Boost power target for GTX 670 is 141W, 29W lower than the GTX 680. Thus like the GTX 680 the GTX 670 has the lowest TDP for a part of its class that we’ve seen out of NVIDIA in quite some time.
Moving on, unlike the GTX 680 launch NVIDIA is letting their partners customize right off the bat. GTX 670 will launch with a mix of reference, semi-custom, and fully custom designs with a range of coolers, clockspeeds, and prices. There are a number of cards to cover over the coming weeks, but today we’ll be looking at EVGA’s GeForce GTX 670 Superclocked alongside our reference GTX 670.
As we’ve typically seen in the past, custom cards tend to appear when GPU manufacturers and their board partners feel more comfortable about GPU availability and this launch is no different. The GTX 670 launch is being helped by the fact that NVIDIA has had an additional 7 weeks to collect suitable GPUs compared to the GTX 680 launch, on top of the fact that these are harvested GPUs. With that said NVIDIA is still in the same situation they were in last week with the launch of the GTX 690: they already can’t keep GK104 in stock.
_thumb.jpg)
_(G57-V100950)_thumb.jpg)
Due to binning GTX 670 isn’t drawn from GTX 680 inventory, so it’s not a matter of these parts coming out of the same pool, but realistically we don’t expect NVIDIA to be able to keep GTX 670 in stock any better than they can GTX 680. The best case scenario is that GTX 680 supplies improve as some demand shifts down to the GTX 670. In other words Auto-Notify is going to continue to be the best way to get a GTX 600 series card.
Finally, let’s talk pricing. If you were expecting GTX 570 pricing for GTX 670 you’re going to come away disappointed. Because NVIDIA is designing GTX 670 to perform closer to GTX 680 than with past video cards they’re also setting the prices higher. GTX 670 will have an MSRP of $399 ($50 higher than GTX 570 at launch), with custom cards going for higher yet. This should dampen demand some, but we don’t expect it will be enough.
Given its $399 MSRP, the GTX 670 will primarily be competing with the $399 Radeon HD 7950. However from a performance perspective the $479 7970 will also be close competition depending on the game at hand. AMD’s Three For Free promo has finally gone live, so they’re countering NVIDIA in part based on the inclusion of Deus Ex, Nexuiz, and DiRT Showdown with most 7900 series cards.
Below that we have AMD’s Radeon HD 7870 at $350, while the GTX 570 will be NVIDIA’s next card down at around $299. The fact that NVIDIA is even bothering to mention the GTX 570 is an interesting move, since it means they expect it to remain as part of their product stack for some time yet.
Update 5/11: NVIDIA said GTX 670 supply would be better than GTX 680 and it looks like they were right. As of this writing Newegg still has 5 of 7 models still in stock, which is far better than the GTX 680 and GTX 690 launches. We're glad to see that NVIDIA is finally able to keep a GTX 600 series card in stock, particularly a higher volume part like GTX 670.
| Spring 2012 GPU Pricing Comparison | |||||
| AMD | Price | NVIDIA | |||
| $999 | GeForce GTX 690 | ||||
| $499 | GeForce GTX 680 | ||||
| Radeon HD 7970 | $479 | ||||
| Radeon HD 7950 | $399 | GeForce GTX 670 | |||
| Radeon HD 7870 | $349 | ||||
| $299 | GeForce GTX 570 | ||||
| Radeon HD 7850 | $249 | ||||
| $199 | GeForce GTX 560 Ti | ||||
| $169 | GeForce GTX 560 | ||||
| Radeon HD 7770 | $139 | ||||
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
414 Comments
View All Comments
Morg. - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
nice trolling, C. disabling ANY unit is like disabling ANY core on a phenom x3 - or did you really think they only ever disabled core #3 ?CeriseCogburn - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
You just blew your own point. AMD cpu's are no exception either - as about 50% of the dual core phenom 2's (according to this sites reviewers) successfully unlock into stable quadcores (another large percentage is user error, bios issue, meme incomatibility,etc) - so just CUTTING OFF default on states is not " a failed core" as you so stupidly state.Further, we can use your junk mentality about cores to comment on the recent 6950 - which unlocked - apparently their junk cores are junk wasted wasted crap binned down to 6950 because they sucked so badly they couldn't make themselves into being a 6970, right ?
NO, you are not correct.
I added a couple of amd examples because I noted your ongoing amd fanboyism, so hope to have jolted you from your spewing idiotic FUD with a few thoughts of your favorite little red friends...
Here with the 680 "cut" into a 670 we have a very SMALL percentage of the core becoming not used, hence the chance that it "just happens to be a failed core that couldn't make the 680 grade" is VERY MINISCULE indeed.
The vast majority are just "cut" for the 670, perhaps every single one, since we see they require a high clock and even overclock better than 680's generally and therefore are from a likely refined and tweaked process.
I certainly wish you fanboys wouls stop spreading stupid put down lies, and then of course, only using them against your hated competition.
There is a BIG DIFFERENCE between disabling two of four cores as amd did in so, so many amd cpus - giving them a chance to use a part that is near a full 50% piece of die failure crap (ROFL) - and ...
Disabling one tiny of 8 functional shaders, leaving 7 of 8 useful, and likely in that case, having all 8 useful and just cutting the access.
Given amd's 50 cpu core hacking cutoffs, "failed dies" may in fact apply to that, but NOT to the 670, except by very rare chance indeed.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
The GTX680 has been selling just about every day on the egg - the verified reviewers trickle in daily.So, what initially is a zero to the clueless zero who doesn't count not only amazon stock and tiger direct stock but about 50 other online and famous vendors and only looks at just newegg or worse yet just repeats a lie they heard because they liked the sound of it, is not really a zero but a trickle.
Let us know if it goes much past the 2.5 month trickle of the 79xx series, and then add in an extra 2 weeks because of the absolutely pathetic amd lack of decent driver situation that is ongoing.... Yes I'll give nVidia 3 or 4 months since those that are being bought slowly in the opressed US economy at least have all their games working at first and SLI working and even STW2 works - not to mention the added features of target frame rate (use evga precision X) and adaptive v-sync in driver 301.24 out for some time now for ALL nVidia cards all the way back to the hated and dreaded by amd fanboys massively re-released and branded "rebrand" G80 or 8 series GPU's.
You may send nVidia a big thank you email for providing massive ongoing value for their entire user base with awesome driver updating, absolutely AWESOME.
Wreckage - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
So AMD now has the 4th fastest card on the market. How far the might have fallen.raghu78 - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
You are out of your mind. In fact AMD's competitiveness in the most demanding games has increased. AMD's 4XAA / 8X AA performance in Batman Arkham city has been fixed with the latest drivers.In fact in Batman Arkham city at 8X AA AMD is now faster . check other websites like legitreviews. In Shogun 2 Nvidia's performance has been hit severely due to the latest patch / driver situation and its clearly behind HD 7970 at 2560 x 1600 and 5760 x 1080. In the most demanding games like BF3, Alan Wake, Crysis 2, Batman Arkham City, The Witcher 2, Shogun 2, Anno 2070, the HD 7970 will easily defeat the GTX 680 given that HD 7970 1Ghz - 1.1 Ghz ( Sapphire HD 7970 Dual X, MSI HD 7970 Lightning (1070) , Powercolor PCS+ HD 7970 Vortex II (1100) ) is available in retail.And not to forget the beautiful performance scaling of the HD 7970. Most users are running the HD 7970 OC editions at 1150 Mhz on stock voltage. Some are pushing it to 1250 with extra voltage. The HD 7970 is a true single GPU beast with the raw power, memory bandwidth and size to handle the most demanding games of today and tomorrow.
maximumGPU - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
im not sure where you get your info from. Most reviews i read placed the 680 above the 7970.in fact since you mention legitreviews:
" Our testing showed that this card did phenomenally well with DirectX 11 game titles and is currently the overall fastest graphics card for gaming.."
raghu78 - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1925/4/"For benchmark testing of Batman: Arkham City we disabled PhysX to keep it fair and ran the game in DirectX 11 mode with 8x MSAA enabled and all the image quality features cranked up. You can see all of the exact settings in the screen captures above. "
Look at the Sapphire HD 7970 Dual X (48 fps) trample the GTX 680 (39 fps)
And if you look at Metro 2033 (DOF with 4X MSAA) . DOF uses compute shaders. really demanding on bandwidth
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1925/10/
The Sapphire HD 7970 Dual X and MSI HD 7970 Lightning are 19% and 23% faster than GTX 680 respectively.
In the most demanding games the HD 7970 shows its raw power. Whats the point in looking at games doing 100 fps. its for suckers like you who don't think at all. Unless you are into multiplayer combat once you cross 60+ fps it doesn't make any difference in normal gaming. scenarios.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
In a single cherry picked instance after a year of amd driver failure, and likely a current cheat with driver chumming, the amd card has magically tweaked out a long lose into a single win - and suddenly you forgot the months on end we all suffered with our overpriced 7970 crapster crashing on every other game randomly.Way to go with pr fanboy passion.
Now see this http://translate.google.pl/translate?hl=pl&sl=...
Oh well, it was fun while it lasted for a single game. Just remember don't turn up the tesselation, make sure to tweak the tesselation cheater slider in amd's CCC bloated ad serving pig, then keep the head held high as the random crash and hours of reinstalling and fixing the newly discovered bugs from the latest driver keep you occupied. No PhysX, they turned it off in your proof game because amd can't hang. ROFL
I amd and I can't play, crip the game so I can win, because I can't play with the eye candy turned on.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
Don't forget about the massive tearing with amd gpu's that is not present on the nVidia implementations.http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1038706634
Then of course almost everyone now recommends 680 in case of going to SLI in the future, because it's so much better than CF, including the reviewer above - so much more important than...
imaginary future 3G never coming lifetime for a single outside the box explicitly setup and tweaked for amd benchmark with just the right settings and game and endless hours searching for the combo to show a single instance... (I guess a couple years of amd fanboys whacking away might find a big lie they can hope to offer)
Wreckage - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
The first game you mention is BF3http://www.anandtech.com/show/5818/nvidia-geforce-...
The 670 absolutley destroys the 7970.
You are trying too hard to get into the AMD focus group. Just stick to the material they send you.