My review of MSI Power Edition gtx 670

[tviceman]

I just got mine unboxed. Here are a few quick pics:

Haven't ran any tests yet other than playing with the fan speed. It's silent at 45% and below inside my Temjin TJ08-e case and somewhat audible inside the case at 50% but not at all distracting. 55% is a little louder, probably a little too loud for my tastes. As the fan ramps up to 60% and above, the pitch increases and becomes more noticeable. It is 75 degrees Fahrenheit inside my house right now (23.9 celsius) and the card is idling at 30 degrees celsius. Because I value silent operation, I will shoot for whatever I can clock it at with 50-55% fan speed being the absolute maximum. The box clearly says it supports voltage adjustments, so I am downloading afterburner 2.2.2 and gearing up for some tests! I will run some baseline tests for temps and benchmarks, then I'll find good stable overclock and rerun everything. My PC has an i7-2600k at 4.5ghz and 8 gigs of 1600mhz ddr3 ram.

 

[tviceman]

It's boosting to 1229mhz at stock settings while running the Heaven benchmark.

2560x1440 Benchmarks, no overclocking applied

Heaven normal tessellation, 16x AF, 0x AA - 54.8 fps
Metro2033 Very High, DOF enabled, physx enabled, AAA - 28.41
Metro2033 High DOF disabled, physx enabled, AAA - 52.76
Metro2033 DX9 High, physx enabled, AAA - 49.73
Batman AC max settings physx high - 50
Crysis Very High - 48.22
Hard Reset max settings FXAA - 123.8

 

[tviceman]

Using Heaven to determine what the highest memory speeds are without overvolting the ram (since afterburner doesn't have support for it yet with this card), I was able to hit 7200mhz without any graphical anomalies or decrease in frame rate. In fact, the fps average continued to scale up with each consecutive vram overclock. (I overclocked to 6500mhz, then 6750, 7000, 7100, 7200, and at 7250 the benchmark completed but started showing graphical anomalies immediately afterword). So I'm backing down to 7150 (+575 in afterburner) and I'm very happy with that.

VRAM OVERCLOCKED RESULTS
-----------------------------

Stock clocks: Heaven @ 2560x1440 with 4x AA, 16x AF, and normal tessellation: 43.0 fps
Vram overclocked: Heaven @ same settings as above: 47.4 fps = 10% increase

Metro2033 @ 2560x1440 Very High DOF enabled physx enabled AAA: 31.87.... 12.1% increase over stock
Crysis Very High @ 2560x1440 Very High no AA: 51.19.... 6% increase over stock
Batman AC @ 2560x1440 Max settings physx high: 51.... 2% increase over stock
Hard Reset @ 2560x1440 Max settings FXAA: 125.5.... 1% increase over stock

More benchmarks incoming...

It looks like my card maxes out at 1264 boost without voltage adjustment. That is only 35mhz higher than what it is getting at stock and not worth rebenching everything for. Looks like I am going to have to wait until afterburner adds voltage control for this card - if it ever does.

 

[The_Golden_Man]

Looking forward to your overclocking results

 

[Rvenger]

Pics not showing

 

[tviceman]

Pics not showing

Hmmmm the pics are showing for me when in chrome private mode, so they should be showing for everyone.

 

[Destiny]

It's boosting to 1229mhz at stock settings while running the Heaven benchmark.

Saved for benchmarks

Congrats on your new GTX 670! Nice looking card.

Is the 1229MHz the out of the box boost clock with no voltage and no adjustments?

Looking forward to your test results!

 

[The_Golden_Man]

I see the pictures. Using latest Firefox

 

[chimaxi83]

Let us know about voltage control man!

 

[tviceman]

Congrats on your new GTX 670! Nice looking card.

Is the 1229MHz the out of the box boost clock with no voltage and no adjustments?

Looking forward to your test results!

1229 is out of box, no changes whatsoever to stock settings

Let us know about voltage control man!

I certainly will. Power Edition should have options for memory voltage and PLL voltage in afterburner, but the latest version out (2.2.2 released today) does not have those options yet.

 

[spinejam]

Let us know about voltage control man!

lol -- we're impatiently waiting like crack-heads needing a fix!

 

[Destiny]

1229 is out of box, no changes whatsoever to stock settings

Wow! That is pretty good! One of the highest I've seen! Some people cannot even OVERCLOCK their GTX 670 cards to that core clock speeds!

 

[Sinister Stairs]

I know the fans are supposed to reverse on startup to blow out dust; but mine spin REALLY loudly, at what I presume to be 100% speed.

Does yours exhibit this behavior as well? Any way to to tweak the startup fan speed to something more reasonable?

 

[tviceman]

I know the fans are supposed to reverse on startup to blow out dust; but mine spin REALLY loudly, at what I presume to be 100% speed.

Does yours exhibit this behavior as well? Any way to to tweak the startup fan speed to something more reasonable?

The fans spin in reverse at start up, but that only lasts a few second. After that they start spinning forward. And there must be some sort of bug in the bios because my fans won't ramp down until I start up afterburner.

 

[tviceman]

Voltage adjustments through MSI afterburner have no effect on my card. Hopefully it's just that afterburner doesn't yet support the ability to adjust voltage on Kepler cards that are capable of doing so.



I updated my second post with my vram overclocking experience with Heaven 3.0.

 

[SirPauly]

Hopefully! That is some-what disappointing and disconcerted considering the volt adjustments were one of the reasons why I also did choose this product Sku. Thanks, for the data.

 

[chimaxi83]

Have you tried contacting MSI? Its not like the box says "Triple Overvoltage!*"


*sometime in the near future

I'd be a little angry, especially if that's one of the reasons I bought the card.

 

[tviceman]

Hopefully! That is some-what disappointing and disconcerted considering the volt adjustments were one of the reasons why I also did choose this product Sku. Thanks, for the data.

The MSI rep here: http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?p=4345545 says it will support voltage adjustments up to 1.3v. So I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

 

[The_Golden_Man]

Pretty annoying it says on the box it has Voltage adjustments, and one has to wait for a later version of MSI Afterburner or something...

 

[tviceman]

DELETED because of benchmarking glitch

 

[blackened23]

Voltage adjustments through MSI afterburner have no effect on my card. Hopefully it's just that afterburner doesn't yet support the ability to adjust voltage on Kepler cards that are capable of doing so.



I updated my second post with my vram overclocking experience with Heaven 3.0.

It won't be available until the next verison of afterburner. MSI Alex confirmed this, it IS coming!

Hold on to the card for sure, it will be a beast.

 

[SirPauly]

The MSI rep here: http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?p=4345545 says it will support voltage adjustments up to 1.3v. So I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Thanks! Very appreciated!

 

[SirPauly]

It won't be available until the next verison of afterburner. MSI Alex confirmed this, it IS coming!

Hold on to the card for sure, it will be a beast.

Thanks for sharing!

 

[cmdrdredd]

It's already been confirmed guys that going to 1400boost doesn't equate to uber scores. You have to also get the memory to clock up too which is the weak link.

Good luck

 

[tviceman]

So I've completed some preliminary benchmarks with just the VRAM overclocked. Metro had huge gains, Heaven had decent gains, but the other 3 had little to no games (see the third post of this thread for the results). So, in a nutshell, gains made from vram overclocking depend entirely on the application or game being used. I'd like to push the vram higher than where I have it now, but I'll have to wait until afterburner gets support for it.

I'm re-installing Crysis Warhead to benchmark... are there any other benches you guys want to see? I have Far Cry 2 and Just Cause 2, but I never play either and the results would be ridiculously high anyways regardless of overclocking. I also have Mafia II, but I doubt I'll ever replay it... (I actually have a ton of games through steam, I am just thinking of the ones that have built in benchmarks)

I'll start seeing what I can bring the core up to without an voltage adjustments and report back on that.