NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 Reviews, EVGA and Gigabyte

NVIDIA claims that their Kepler-based GPUs have significant overclocking headroom thanks to somewhat conservative stock frequencies, so we fired up of EVGA’s excellent Precision performance tuning utility, which already supports the GeForce GTX 670, to see just how much additional performance we could wring from the card. We also installed a slick GeForce GTX 670 skin that matches the color scheme of the reference card.

In one NVIDIA's technical documents related to this launch, they note that most GeForce GTX 670 cards should be able to overclock to the 1.1GHz range with stock voltages and cooling. We were, however, able to push things much farther than that..

EVGA's Precision Performance Tuning Utility With GTX 690 Skin

By cranking up the power target by 11% and increasing the GPU Clock Offset by 135MHz, our Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 would consistently boost to about 1.293GHz with perfect stability and zero visual artifacts. We were also able to crank the memory clock up by another 139MHz for an additional performance boost. (We were, unfortunately unable to overclock the EVGA GeForce GTX 670 due to an issue with one of our sample's memory chips that arose towards the end of our testing.) The excellent cooler on the Gigabyte card also had no trouble dissipating any additional heat generated by overclocking, as evidenced by the chilly 38'C the card cooled down to seconds after finishing some tests.

Overclocking the GeForce GTX 670 Putting The Pedal to the Metal

While we had the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 overclocked, we re-ran a couple of tests and saw some significant performance gains. In fact, in both tests, the overclocked GeForce GTX 670 was able to overtake the reference GeForce GTX 680.