Gigabyte GTX 670 Windforce 3X OC 2GB Graphics Card Review

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Gigabyte GTX 670 Windforce 3X OC 2GB Graphics Card Review - eTeknix

Whether you are an AMD or Nvidia partner, your aim is to make a unique card that can harness the chips power and performance, while adding a unique spin onto things, whether it be from an overclock straight out of the factory, or a custom cooler. Heck, it may even be both, giving you a sweet recipe that will keep the consuming wanting more.
Now occassionally you’ll see a range of graphics cards that really break the boundaries, and we see this with every brand on the market today, and it’s what makes them famous and recognizable within the retail industry. MSI are famous for their TwinFrozr coolers, while Sapphire are renowned the world over by their Vapor-x specialist cooling solution, and XFX are known for their Double Dissipation cooler, or as most would prefer the big Double D’s.
Then we have Gigabyte, who are known across the world for their patented Windforce cooler with triple fan design, which looks very similar to the solutions we see from leading GPU cooler; Arctic.
The card comes with a factory overclock straight out of the box to give the user even more power than a reference GTX 670, which is already a powerful card for a reasonable price. Having an overclock means the reference clocks have been pushed further, past their stock limits, meaning that the extra cooling provided by the Windforce 3X cooler should really come in handy, and we’re extremely keen to see how this card compares in our lineup of AMD and Nvidia based cards.
As you know we us, we like to give you a full look at what’s on offer, so before we get benching, lets take a look at the packaging and bundle that is on offer from Gigabyte. Once this is out the way, we can take a look at the card in some more detail, including the Windforce 3X cooler that’s been strapped on, including taking a look at those overclock speeds.
Once that’s done and dusted, we can get on to seeing how this thing performs across our usual variety of games and benchmarking applications.

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Firstly, taking a look at the box, we see a very simple design that gets straight to the point. The main aspect is taken up by a large piece of artwork that resembles an eye, with the key features listed to the side including “OC Version, Windforce cooling”, and that the card comes with 2GB of GDDR5 memory.



The back of the box reserves a huge chunk to talk about the Windforce 3X cooling solution, as this is the main selling point of the card over other custom designs as well as reference cooler cards. There is a small piece of information about PCI-Express 3.0 and the main features of the card also.



Inside we find a very small bundle including a quick guide, driver installation CD, a Molex to 6-pin adapter and Molex to 8-pin PCI-Express power adapter.

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Taking a first glance look at the card, we can see a much larger than reference design due to the patented Windforce 3X cooler that we’ve seen on other cards from Gigabyte in the past. The model number sits just above the PCI-Express connector, though this is the only branding on the card that it’s a GTX 670 as the GTX 680 Windforce 3X looks exactly the same.



The cooler is known as the Windforce 3X, and that’s down to the three large Gigabyte branded fans with translucent fins that sit above a large two-part heatsink combination.



The two aluminium heatsinks are joined by three large copper heatpipes and pass from one end of the card to the other.



Flipping the card around we see a large metal bracket that spans across the top of the card to give extra support to the PCB due to the weight of the cooler.



Moving towards the end of the card we see that the typical two 6-pin PCIe connectors have had a slight change and instead now see a single 6-pin and a single 8-pin power connector. With the overclock present out of the factory, extra power is needed from the 8-pin connector.



Towards the end of the card we find two Nvidia SLI fingers for those wanting to get some serious multi-GPU action to give the best performance in gaming.



Taking a look at the display outputs on this card, we see the same configuration as with a reference GTX 670 with a DVI-I and DVI-D connector, HDMI and full-size DisplayPort. Being a GTX 670, we also have the ability for Nvidia surround for up to four displays with just a singular card.



Finishing our look at the card, we decide to take a look at the specifications in GPU-Z, especially when compared to a stock GTX 670 graphics card to see how far the clock speeds have been increased. A stock GTX 670 has a reference speed of 915MHz with a memory speed of 1502MHz (6Gbps Effective), whereas this card has had its clock speed increased to 980MHz, in turn increasing the boost speed from 980MHz to 1059MHz. The memory clock speed has remained the same at 1502MHz however.

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The test the performance of this card, we use the latest drivers direct from the manufacturer and run each test three times to obtain a fair average set of results.

Test System:
Asus Rampage IV Extreme
Intel Core i7 3960X
16GB Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz
Corsair H80
Corsair HX1050W
Kingston HyperX 256GB SSD
Lian Li T60
3 x AOC E2795VH

We would like to thank AOC, Asus, Corsair, Kingston, and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components.

Games used:
Aliens Vs Predator
Batman: Arkham City
Mafia II
Metro 2033

Hardware used:
Plug-in electricity usage monitor
Sound level meter

Software used:
3DMark 11
HWMonitor
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

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3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online.



We start things off with 3DMark11 and straight away see some really strong performance with scores of E3074 and P9012 falling just behind the GTX 680 cards and slightly ahead of the 7970 from AMD.

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Heaven 2.5 is regarded to be one of the most intensive Benchmarking utilities about at the moment along with the likes of 3DMark. It makes use of highly comprehensive tessellation technology, advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) and a highly defined light algorithm to produce ever changing light conditions amongst other items.



Moving on to Heaven, we can see strong results again from the GTX 670 OC from Gigabyte, showing that the card is able to deal better with Tessellation than AMD equivalents.
The card falls just behind the Palit GTX 680 across all resolutions showing that the overclock really helps this card out across this benchmark.

[siopao1984]

Aliens Vs Predator is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that relies on DirectX 11 and high amounts of Tessellation in conjunction to give enhanced shadows and fantastic textures to the surrounds and characters within the game.



Moving over to games, we can start things off with Aliens Vs Predator and straight away see a trend coming from this card as we see strong numbers across all resolutions including triple monitor configurations.
When comparing to the AMD 7970, we can see the Radeon based card manages to squeeze ahead slightly by a few frames per second.

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Batman: Arkham City was release late in 2011 as a sequal to Arkham Asylum. The game uses large scale mapping with heavy effects on lighting and the environment along with a lot of tessellation in a fast moving gaming scene. It utilises DirectX 11 for shadows, lighting, reflections and particles to give the best gaming experience possible.



Moving over to Batman: Arkham City, we see the GTX 670 from Gigabyte giving us some of the best frame rates we’ve seen from any card at lower resolutions. We still see a strong 47FPS when operating at 5760×1080 showing that the overclock manages to push this card ahead of the competition including the GTX 680 based cards.

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Mafia II is an older game and therefore it does have older graphics engines, however this is is still a good all-round in game benchmark that combines the terrain and explosion rendering of Crysis with the dust and dirt particle rendering test of Dirt 2. It also takes into account the changing light conditions albeit not in quite the same detail as the others, but none-the-less still proves a cards capabilities on slightly older games.



Mafia II sees the GTX 670 OC lining up exactly where we expect it to be, just below the GTX 680 cards.

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Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics intense games on the market.



Within Metro 2033, the GTX 670 once again falls in-line with where we expect it to be, falling just behind the Palit GTX 680 reference card at certain resolutions, but at 5760×1080 the Gigabyte GTX 670 OC shows that it’s able to keep up with its bigger brother, the GTX 680.