My review of MSI Power Edition gtx 670

[The_Golden_Man]

Batman: Arkham City with everything maxed out

 

[toyota]

Uhmmm wow check out this result. Overclocking only the vram resulted in a 34% performance increase in Metro!

Stock clocks: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/48143072/metro super high.jpg

Stock core, vram @ 7150mhz: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/48143072/metro very high ram OC.jpg

how in the world can ocing the memory by 19% give a 34% increase in performance? I ran the same bench at 6000 and then at 7030, which is just over 17%, and it gave 11% increase. sure your higher res would impact it more but it still makes zero sense that the memory can scale at nearly twice the rate that you oced it too.

 

[tviceman]

how in the world can ocing the memory by 19% give a 34% increase in performance? I ran the same bench at 6000 and then at 7150 and it gave 7% increase. sure your higher res would impact it more but it still makes zero sense that the memory can scale at nearly twice the rate that you oced it too.

I know. I don't understand it either. I was literally laughing out loud and scratching my head.

 

[tviceman]

It looks like my card maxes out at around 1264 boost without voltage adjustment. It crashed at +75 and +50mhz. 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.

 

[toyota]

I know. I don't understand it either. I was literally laughing out loud and scratching my head.

I edited my post. it seems my memory stops scaling at about 7000 in that game. still your gains just are not logical.

It looks like my card maxes out at around 1264 boost without voltage adjustment. It crashed at +75 and +50mhz. 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.

thats not too bad but i would have expected more. my card will do 1283/7000 perfectly stable in every bench. I thought it would do 1289 but Heaven would crash it.

 

[blackened23]

It looks like my card maxes out at around 1264 boost without voltage adjustment. It crashed at +75 and +50mhz. 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.

Are you using higher manual fan settings? I bet you can get more, but you'll have to sacrifice silence.

 

[tviceman]

I edited my post. it seems my memory stops scaling at about 7000 in that game. still your gains just are not logical.


thats not too bad but i would have expected more. my card will do 1283/7000 perfectly stable in every bench. I thought it would do 1289 but Heaven would crash it.

I reran the benchmark without the overclocks and got a significantly higher frame rate 0 28.41 or something like that. So the first time I ran the benchmark, it must have glitched or had some kind of pause to give it the really low score. The new comparison between the two is more in line with expectations - 12.4% or so.

 

[tviceman]

Are you using higher manual fan settings? I bet you can get more, but you'll have to sacrifice silence.

Yeah I'm topping the fan out at 50%. Temps are maxing out at 67 in unigine, low 60's in everything else. I am not willing to sacrifice noise for a few higher mhz. I'll wait until the voltage unlock comes out (if it ever does) and then tweak some more.

 

[The_Golden_Man]

It looks like my card maxes out at around 1264 boost without voltage adjustment. It crashed at +75 and +50mhz. 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.

One of my ASUS GTX 670 Direct CU II 'Non TOP' can manage about 1324MHz Turbo boost. The other DC II cannot even make it to 1200MHz. Both can manage 6.8GHz on the mem, but not much higher.

My reference MSI GTX 670 can make it to about 1234MHz Turbo boost and closer to 7GHz on the mem (Not tested that much).

 

[tviceman]

Ohhhhh yeah I got 1269mhz in Heaven yeah baby! LOL.... But seriously, I'm happy with it. The vram is as fast as I hoped it would be, and *HOPEFULLY* with a little voltage adjustment I can hit 1325 or so with boost and call it day. Not that it would give me a tangible performance increase, but it would help me sleep better at night!

50% fan speed is only audible when all speakers are turned down AND I am listening for it. So for the card to be running in the mid to low 60's at full load and that fan speed, I'm very happy.

 

[SickBeast]

OP can you add more vcore to the core than is possible on other cards? How high can the voltage go? How high can you hit on the core?

 

[chimaxi83]

OP can you add more vcore to the core than is possible on other cards? How high can the voltage go? How high can you hit on the core?

He has no voltage control unfortunately. Just the same +100 that everyone else gets on Afterburner.

 

[tviceman]

OP can you add more vcore to the core than is possible on other cards? How high can the voltage go? How high can you hit on the core?

He has no voltage control unfortunately. Just the same +100 that everyone else gets on Afterburner.

Exactly. I don't have the ability to right now, MSI says it is in the works.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Ohhhhh yeah I got 1269mhz in Heaven yeah baby! LOL.... But seriously, I'm happy with it. The vram is as fast as I hoped it would be, and *HOPEFULLY* with a little voltage adjustment I can hit 1325 or so with boost and call it day. Not that it would give me a tangible performance increase, but it would help me sleep better at night!

50% fan speed is only audible when all speakers are turned down AND I am listening for it. So for the card to be running in the mid to low 60's at full load and that fan speed, I'm very happy.

Very likely that your limit on the fan noise will limit how far you'll be able to go even with voltage control. Remember GTX 600 series GPUs throttle at 70c so if you start pushing high voltage and high clock speeds it will get hot and require higher fan speed.

To me, not worth it unless you're on water. Who wants to run 80% fan speed to keep the things cool enough to avoid throttling under heavy load just to gain a few fps that doesn't make a game more playable. Faster is better only to a point IMO.

I don't care too much about noise really, but when you start getting above 60% it gets a little more noticeable for me and honestly just not really worth it. The only time it would be worth it for me, and this is just my opinion, is if a game goes from unplayable slideshow to smooth as butter. With a GTX 670 I don't think there is such a situation except at very high resolutions.

 

[tviceman]

Here's a quick summary of what I've experienced so far.

Max boost speeds at stock settings are 1229mhz.
Max OC'd boost speeds with the power slider maxed out is 1269mhz. (+40 on the core)
Max vram speed is 7200mhz.

With the fan profile set to ramp up to 50%, the fan is barely audible (cannot hear it over fairly quiet to normal computer speaker volume) when fully enclosed in the case and temps max out at 67 degrees Celsius in Heaven and 63 degrees in gaming benchmarks when the room temperature is 75 degrees Fahrenheit (28.8 Celsius). I look forward to getting voltage adjustments. I'm not going to hold my breath that it will happen, despite the box clearly saying it can AND MSI reps saying that it's coming.

Annoyingly, once Windows start loading, the fans ramp up to high speeds and will not ramp down until afterburner is loaded.

 

[badb0y]

Nice tviceman! Enjoy your new card!

 

[Sinister Stairs]

Annoyingly, once Windows start loading, the fans ramp up to high speeds and will not ramp down until afterburner is loaded.

Strange - my card has the opposite behavior: The fans spin really quickly/loudly until Windows loads (and no Afterburner autoloaded). My card has problem waking from Sleep too; I guess I'll check with support.

To provide something constructive to this topic, my card fit into a Silverstone Sugo SG07 case w/ Asus P8H67-I Deluxe mini-ITX motherboard.

 

[DrBoss]

I've already sold one of my MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III's and the sale is pending on the second one...

Just got an auto notify from Newegg that the MSI GTX 670 Twin Frozr IV are back in stock... so i've grabbed one.
Hopefully by the time it arrives the new afterburner will be released.

I'm looking forward to similar performance to my previous Radeon's in crossfire, minus the microstutter. It's been two generations since i had an Nvidia GPU in my rig.

 

[tviceman]

Small quick update: running heaven in a continuous loop revealed that 1269 was still unstable. Turns out 1250 is the max my GPU will do on stock voltage. Still though, with temps only reaching 67 degrees celsius on the GPU with room temps at 75 Fahrenheit (28.8 celsius) I can't complain. Hopefully with the voltage mods I can hit 1300mhz boost and 7250mhz on the vram for everyday use. Not that it would be noticeably faster than what it is now, it's more for peace of mind and nice round numbers.

 

[SirPauly]

My stable boosts are 1242 GPU boost and 3402 for ram.

 

[tviceman]

Quick update: The mod at guru3d (afterburner's official forums) confirmed with me that the next release of afterburner will include support for voltage mod on the power edition gtx670 (as well as the lightning gtx 680).

Good news for overclockers!

 

[blackened23]

Dunno, every time i've overvolted a gpu/cpu it exacerbated any temperature issues, and always required a more aggressive fan curve...

Its really tough to find a sweet spot with fan speed/noise/temps with higher voltage. But I can't wait to test things out, hopefully the new afterburner is released this week. It should also be noted that afterburner/precision don't report proper voltage with kepler GPUs beyond 1175, due to drivers. Some guys at other boards are using multimeters on their lightnings to see whats going on under the hood.

Thats a really good heaven score for a 670, in any case

 

[The_Golden_Man]

Dunno, every time i've overvolted a gpu/cpu it exacerbated any temperature issues, and always required a more aggressive fan curve...

Its really tough to find a sweep spot with fan speed/noise/temps with higher voltage. But I can't wait to test things out, hopefully the new afterburner is released this week. It should also be noted that afterburner/precision don't report proper voltage with kepler GPUs beyond 1175, due to drivers. Some guys at other boards are using multimeters on their lightnings to see whats going on under the hood.

Thats a really good heaven score for a 670, in any case

I agree, that is my experience too. I can imagine the heat and noise past 1.175v on Kepler will soon become difficult.

 

[blackened23]

I agree, that is my experience too. I can imagine the heat and noise past 1.175v on Kepler will soon become difficult.

Yeah, i've always assumed that pushing to the max = putting up with noise D: even the 690 i've been using has to use maximum manual fan to get the best OC. Anything less and it isn't completely stable. Thats why i'm looking into water for whenever I settle on my build, definitely won't have noise issues then.

 

[tviceman]

Dunno, every time i've overvolted a gpu/cpu it exacerbated any temperature issues, and always required a more aggressive fan curve...

Its really tough to find a sweep spot with fan speed/noise/temps with higher voltage. But I can't wait to test things out, hopefully the new afterburner is released this week. It should also be noted that afterburner/precision don't report proper voltage with kepler GPUs beyond 1175, due to drivers. Some guys at other boards are using multimeters on their lightnings to see whats going on under the hood.

Thats a really good heaven score for a 670, in any case

I am actually not going to shoot for crazy high overclocks. I entirely agree with you on the issues that come with it (increased fan speed). I'm at 1250mhz boost right now (I think, can't remember for sure and I'm not home) and 7200mhz ram. I'd like to just run it at 1300mhz boost. Just because it sounds nice.