MSI 670 GTX

[CardsFan88]

Got the new MSI GTX 670, reference cooler, smaller pcb version. (pretty sure it's the smaller pcb version). Still seems like a decent sized card though and seems roughly similar in sized to my previous card the ATI HIS 5850.

 

This one

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127675

 

While the 5850 is wholly capable of playing Battlefield 3, Skyrim, Arkham City, Crysis 2 and the rest pretty well, I have to say this card rocks it hard.

 

While my 3dmark score was ~p3800 for the 5850 with my i7 920 @ 4 ghz, the stockish (msi's slight overclock to 967 mhz along with the new auto boost, 1502 mhz memory) gets p8454 on the same system. I must say I was shocked by how much difference this card has made in gameplay.

 

Before I'd need to turn down shaders, AA/AF most of the time, and for Battlefield 3/Crysis 2 dx11 ultra mod, it was basically medium settings. With the 670 GTX I've basically been bumping up everything to max (@1920x1080) and the gameplay is smooth as silk, though something with Crysis 2 isn't allowing me to play online (not vid card related) so I can't judge that. But every game I've thrown at it has resulted in highest settings AND smoother gameplay.

 

I think this adaptive Vsync is a winning feature, which I guess has been introduced in earlier models of nvidia, and I must say I've been impressed with the overall smoothness. No tearing or stuttering.

 

Silky smooth gameplay at the highest settings of today's generation of games (at 1080p). Obviously you'll need more if you have a higher resolution display, but this card rocks for the 1080p display crew.

 

While it won't be an Unreal 4 engine killer, I think we'll need the big version of the generation beyond Maxwell or ATI's equivalent to get that. But until then, and until a good portion of games utilize such tech, this card I suspect will be a good option for anyone with an i7 920 or better CPU.

 

Oh yeah, and I'm still rolling with a pcie 2.0 motherboard, just in case anyone is wondering if this level of performance is only with pcie 3.0. Nope your pcie 2.0 is still good enough. Again probably not until Unreal 4 engine type tech is out will a pcie 3.0 really be needed. Just a guess on that.

 

This thing rocks the Uningine at max settings.

 

Heaven Benchmark v3.0 Basic

FPS:

43.4

Scores:

1094

Min FPS:

20.0

Max FPS:

109.9

 

Arkham City has gone from modest settings at 43 fps average with ATI 5850 to 55 at the highest settings except for AA being set at 8x (to match other reviewers settings). When AA is set to Nvidia's CSAA at 32x it only drops to an average of 53! Wow. These are with Vsync enabled. Without vsync, and still with 32x CSAA enabled the average was a powerful 69 dude!

 

Battlefield 3 at highest settings is silky smooth online. Way better than the medium settings and still choppy with the 5850.

 

Skyrim with the official and other higher res textures looks amazing and smooth on this card.

 

Red Faction: Guerrilla while an older game, has some intense physics. The 5850 struggled with this game at decent settings. The 670 GTX rocks it at highest settings.

 

Metro 2033 is about the toughest thing and even on the highest settings including the dx 11 and physics options it seems to run from the 20's-40's indoors at least (just a quick test, non-shooting). Turn off the DOF and lower the AA and AF and it gets back to silky smooth. But that's Metro 2033 and lets hope the sequel is optimized better.

 

Got lots more games to try out like Deus Ex, Rage, Dirt 2, X3 series, Stalker series, Saints Row 3, Homefront, AvP, Bioshock 2, AC:B, Civ V, Anno 2070, Just Cause 2, Mass Effect 2 and others, but so far this card absolutely rocks.

 

With the reference cooler, furmark gets it up to about 85c's at max, which isn't bad considering ambient temps are around 80 F. I'm sure I can probably squeeze something out of it above the factory oc.

 

Haven't overclocked the card yet. Just trying various things out now at stock, with some time for enjoying it as well. Plenty of time to do that

 

When all is said and done, when it comes to 1080p gaming with the strong dx11 and other games on the market, the 5850 while capable of playing them, the 670 GTX can actually play them WELL. This is a great dx11 card. While it may not be future proofed, the stuff ahead is so much more demanding, I don't think there is much future proofing capable. This card can run today's games at 1080p amazingly well. 2GB RAM isn't a ton by today's standard, but by the time a 1080p display needs more, it'll be time for an upgrade anyways.

 

If you don't have a dx11 card, and don't want to spend a ton, I believe right now this is your card. 399 is alot, but not 500-1100 which seems to be where alot of these other cards are. I don't think the difference between the 670 and 680 is worth a 100 bucks. Hell if I had the 5870 instead of the 5850, I'd still have wanted this card. Same thing will be true a couple of years down the line between the 670 and 680 imo.

 

All this said I have a strong feeling that with big Kepler on the way, the 670 is just a stop gap card allowing them to get the process up and running that won't be offered for very long. In my estimation when big kepler arrives, it will be the 500-600 dollar card, and the 680 will be dropped to a 379-449 price range and replace the 670. It's just a guess, but if all you lose to get this awesome card now is the difference between the 670 to 680, imo it's not worth it to wait until sept-nov to get the 680 at this price range when this card is available right now for cheap.

 

I do wish I could of gotten the better cooler version (like the gigabyte), but what can I say, newegg was out of it, and with the ones they had in stock the MSI seemed to be the best one, and the local Fry's electronics had it in stock, so I picked it up (after going to the other one when the people on the phone told me they had it in stock at the other one). It was worth the extra tax and total 50 or so miles driving. Even this one is worth it.

 

Great performance at good price especially considering the competition from ATI or even Nvidia itself. This is the value card for now, even if it's a bit hard to say value and $399 in the same sentence. Love this card. I am much impressed and this card will give me the best performance I've had at this point in the game generational cycle. I buy from both companies, but ATI is going to have some tough times ahead imo when big kepler comes out, small kepler is already outperforming them this generation.

Edited May 14, 2012 by CardsFan88

[CardsFan88]

Okay so I overclocked this beast a good bit. I got it to run 3dmark11 at 100 mhz over the factory oc, but it seemed to be iffy. At 90 mhz over, it worked flawlessly. So at these settings at least for 3dmark11 it works just fine. As for the memory, I kept pushing it up and up, I was a bit conservative, but eventually went up 25 mhz at a time and still haven't hit a wall. It's now at +300 mhz on the memory. Pretty crazy. Temps seem fine.

 

At 90 mhz over for the core clock goes something like this.

 

Stock 670 = 915 mhz

MSI's Factory OC stock = 967 mhz

Thus my MSI +90mhz = 1057 mhz

Then add in Nvidia boost = up to 1136 mhz

So 1136-915 = 221 mhz increase that on the surface seems stable, on reference cooler, and I think small pcb.

 

This new overclocking scheme with MSI's afterburner is a bit weird. Instead of an actual volt number, it only gives you a number over. It's set at 25 over, it seems to like to be set at 12-13 intervals. Thus it's two notches over, or maybe two half notches over. This still needs to be played around with up and down as I don't know how necessary it is for how I'm pushing it.

 

Also there is a max power which is limited to 122 percent of power. I think this is holding me back, and enabling the unofficial overclock mode at least in this version of Afterburner with this card gives absolutely nothing new (as opposed to ATI when you enabled it). Thus I think the Afterburner is holding me back. It's also weird that when I push up the memory gpu-z doesn't seem to catch it all, which makes me wonder if some of it immediately adds on and the rest (like half and half) gets added maybe to the nvidia boost? It's pretty weird have 3 levels of oc. 1 factory. 2 me. 3 Nvidia's boost on top.

 

Anyone know if evga's can be used on an msi or other card? Or any other good overclocking utilities for Nvidia cards?

 

Overall though it's 2:55 am here so I'm done for the evening. What I got was a stellar almost 800 point increase in 3dmark11. From ~8400 to ~9200. Not bad for an i7 920 and a single gpu, not top of the line, vid card....at least for starters.

 

With Arkham City, vsync off and all options maxed again including 32x CSAA, the average in the benchmark was 54. Only a 1 fps increase, but that's with Vsync enabled and not alot of room to go up to hit 60 and make up the difference. WITHOUT Vsync, it gives me a 76 fps average. So 7 fps extra at max settings on top of the factory overclock? Not bad. Again this card may have a little bit more too.

 

As for Uningine 3.0

 

Heaven Benchmark v3.0 Basic

FPS:

48.3

Scores:

1216

Min FPS:

25.5

Max FPS:

122.7

 

That's 4.9 FPS more for the 'extra' manual overclock (12.8 fps max higher) above and beyond the stock MSI overclock and nvidia boost.

 

When you compare that to a slightly overclocked 5850 with these numbers

 

FPS:

17.3

Scores:

435

Min FPS:

4.2

Max FPS:

44.4

 

You see that it IS a huge difference in today's games with dx11, tessellation, etc. 17.3 Average or 48.3? That's a huge difference, and it's only 3.6 fps away from being 300 percent faster than a slightly overclocked 5850. 300 percent!

 

I'm still amazed that even at 'out of the box' settings the 3dmark11 and Uningine benchmarks run smoothly.

 

Also I forgot to mention that my SSD drive is mostly for OS. So while 3dmark11 is on it, Arkham City is on a regular sata II mechanical hard drive.

 

This card rocks.

 

Oh yeah one sort of big thing at least to me, I heard rumors that the 500-600 series of Nvidia would be DX 11.1 compatible. Well GPU-Z indeed does state my directx version is 11.1!

 

Edited May 14, 2012 by CardsFan88

[90sgamer]

Thanks for the info/review Cardsfan! I'm going from a HD 5870 to a GTX 670. This gives me pretty good idea of the performance increase I can expect, even though I have a slightly faster Radeon card. I've already got the EVGA card, but I haven't tried it out yet. I'm waiting for a few more parts for my Ivy Bridge build and I will set it up in that.

 

I usually go for the fastest single GPU card I can get my hands on when I upgrade, but the GTX 670 was too good of a deal to pass up, especially after constantly hunting for a GTX 680 in stock. I was hoping for a little better Metro 2033 performance (love that game), but other than that I think it will blow me away since I only use 1920x1080.

 

For me, the best part will be getting Nvidia driver support again!

[CardsFan88]

Thanks for the info/review Cardsfan! I'm going from a HD 5870 to a GTX 670. This gives me pretty good idea of the performance increase I can expect, even though I have a slightly faster Radeon card. I've already got the EVGA card, but I haven't tried it out yet. I'm waiting for a few more parts for my Ivy Bridge build and I will set it up in that.

 

I usually go for the fastest single GPU card I can get my hands on when I upgrade, but the GTX 670 was too good of a deal to pass up, especially after constantly hunting for a GTX 680 in stock. I was hoping for a little better Metro 2033 performance (love that game), but other than that I think it will blow me away since I only use 1920x1080.

 

For me, the best part will be getting Nvidia driver support again!

 

You should get some good frames! Probably even a bigger boost! The 5870 was only like 10 percent better like 3-7 frames. With the same card, yet an ivy bridge, you should get more than that differential as compared to what increase I got (assuming you overclock). Once again it's also a Dx 11.1 card too

 

On a side note just for giggles I decided to run 3dmark 01, 03, 05 just to see what this overclocked 670 could do with them. For one, it's crazy seeing 4 digit frame numbers. I saw 3-4K (yes thousand) FPS for a second or two in these now worthless, but amusing to run tests. I think the 5850 had troubles running some of these before, but the nvidia card did. Anyways, here are the scores for these outdated benchmarks

 

3dmark01 = 54803

3dmark03 = 104391 (yeah over 100k lol)

3dmark05 = 34027

 

Pretty crazy numbers.

Edited May 14, 2012 by CardsFan88

[GameRonin]

I've got the EVGA Superclocked GTX670 coming tomorrow. Upgrading from HD3000 graphics, lol. Can't wait to test it out on Diablo III and anything else I decide to pick up for my rig now that it's finally complete.

[RedFury77]

Thanks for the good review, nice to see a lot of games that I have thrown at it!

So if the price keeps going down (680 to 670) and the performance is nearly the same...what's the 660 going to do for ~$250? I'm curious.

 

Pretty cool to see you got a card that OCs 220mghz over stock. When that gigabyte card was posted out of AU, it seemed that a 670 that could go that high was going to be a bit of a diamond in the ruff...maybe not after all.

[CardsFan88]

Just an update, I did get a couple of crashes in BF3 maxed out online at the +90 on top of the factory overclock and nvidia overclocking (1136 core / 1702 memory). Though this might be my error as I was messing around with the auto fan, so it's possible I had the auto fan shut off and this might have caused it.

 

The memory seems fine at the great overclocks (410 seems to be the max, so I'm keeping it at +400), so it's definitely the chip if it wasn't human error.

 

Once they get these chips ironed out it wouldn't surprise me that the next round in this generation will have better oc'ing *unless of course they bump up the specs* natively. These are also the early chips and the next batch might be a bit more stable. That said to get such an early card with such new tech and it still gets that high to be playable for awhile before crash isn't bad, and again could have been human error. I got the small pcb and reference fan and still got to these levels.

 

I'm going to try again to keep it at +90 while making sure the fan auto is on, doh, and see if I get any more errors. If more crashes occur, I'll probably try for +50-60 (which would be 1096-1106mhz core clock) and see how that goes, then go from there and work my way up. But the memory is staying at +400 as it seems to be fine at this level.

 

I did receive errors with a much older version of OCCT, but I just ran it again with the much newer 4.2.2 version at +90 (1136mhz total) for 9 minutes, 6 total testing plus the 1 minute before and 2 after, and got no errors.

 

The auto fan seems to target 85c's and raises the fan to keep it there. Seems like at these levels 1136/1702 it only needs the to spin the fan up to the 60's percent level to maintain an 85c level. For the OCCT test 65 percent was the max, and this is the smaller pcb, reference cooler mind you. For idle it seems like 35% fan level keeps the chip around 55c's for ambient around 25-28c at 1136 mhz / 1702 mhz.

 

It's also important to remember that just at stock speeds and an i7 920 @ 4ghz and pcie 2.0, you can run BF3 and the like at max settings @1080p, and the gameplay be nice and smooth. So the oc's just give you a little bit of a cushion for the games coming out in the next year or so.

 

But right around 1136/1702 seems to be either stable or almost stable. I'll figure it out going forward. If I have to cut it back, 1100 mhz can probably still be kept which would still be a +185 core spec raise and a 20.2% raise, or 24.1% raise at 1136mhz from the core specs percentage wise with small pcb and reference fan.

[_TheAlexO]

Okay I got really excited because I saw your name and thought you were a fellow Missourian who's a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals lol. THEN, I checked your location..

 

 

you suck

[CardsFan88]

Okay I got really excited because I saw your name and thought you were a fellow Missourian who's a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals lol. THEN, I checked your location..

 

 

you suck

 

ROFL, I'm a D-Bags fan for baseball.