GTX 670 From Point Of View

The GeForce GTX 670 is a DirectX 11 and shader model 5.0 supporting graphics card with existing NVIDIA features such as NVIDIA 3-way SLI Technology, PhysX, PureVideo HD and CUDA.
Inside the box, the GeForce GTX 670 reference card feels a tad cheaper as compared to the GTX 680. The cooler feels very plastic and the sheer weight is so much lighter then the GTX 680. Inside the box were the card itself, a CD driver and a manual.

 Game testing on Battlefield 3, the card never went down 60 frames per second even with all the eye candy opened up in game and again at 4xAA the card still pushes 55 FPS at 19x12 and that is just a couple of frames per second away from the GTX 680. All the sprites from the smoke, explosions, bullets, rubble and flying dead bodies where amazingly nice to look at.

After playing for some time, it kept a decent temperature of around 70°C (room temp of 30°C) which was fantastic since it was being tested at ultra settings.  Even if the peak heat levels would close in towards 75 Degrees C. That's perfectly fine within the thermal design of the card. We did notice that the cooler exhausts lots and lots of hot airflow, as such the card produces a lot of heat. No biggy as the cooler design is not exhausting or leaking hot air inside the PC. After touching my case, it did not feel like something was baked inside, the blower type fan did help a lot keeping the internal temperature of my case low.

The noise levels are okay but you can hear a low hum coming from the cooler. In desktop and idle mode you will not hear the card, it really is silent. Under hefty gaming load however you will be able to hear the product. We rated the card at 42~43 DBa (including background noise). That however is a normal noise level, which means you can hear the card, but not at annoying levels.

I then played Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and used the maximum settings, with all the bells and whistles and off the bat I had more than 200 fps showing on my HUD.

How about video conversion? Since my video converter can use GPU acceleration, it might be a good way to test the GTX 670 and Nvidia's CUDA technology. I chose a 22 minute 720p from my collection and was to resize it to 320x240 MPEG4 format and was finish after 1 minute 22.5 seconds which was not bad at all.

Then it was time to test ATI Stream which I presume would use OpenCL and finished after 1 minutes 31 seconds flat which was about 9 seconds slower. Surprisingly, even without the GPU acceleration via OpenCL, the CPU conversion took 1 minute 24.1 seconds which was 7 seconds faster. Could this be that for my converter, CUDA does work even if it just shaved a few seconds? It is hard to say but 2 seconds is 2 seconds.

 

The most most defining factor for any high end range product is as always would be the pricing. If I am in the market for a new GPU, what would it be? It would be nice to get the full bore and buy a GTX 680 but the price is too steep, a GTX 660ti would be nice but even after overclocking the card, it might not be enough. Then here is the GTX 670 PoV. Priced relatively decent at around PHP18000, it offers a ton of performance that's akin to its bigger brother the GTX 680, and some examples of the GTX 670 can be over clocked so good that it can even surpass its elder sibling while being cheaper as well by an average of PHP7000 (as of this writing).
This is Point of View's first strike on out market and what it did, it did it well, providing enthusiast a decent base in the form of a reference GTX 670 that is a bit easy on a budget. Why is a reference design a good base for enthusiast? Two words: WATER BLOCKS. Reference designed GPU are great for H2O cooling, not due to some magic but manufacturers can design water blocks that can easily regardless the brand. Even if you are not going that way, I do prefer the blower type configuration since it helps blow hot air outside the case. Not bad for an European country that has offices in Asia for our market (and Holland out of the countries! I was expecting something more industrial like Germany).

So what can I say? The GTX 670 is a fabulous card, if I am on the market for a new GPU and wanted a ton of performance that it a bit easy to swallow, the Point of View GTX 670 is an excellent choice since it also has a 1 year store and 1 year distributor warranty which makes the PoV GTX 670 easily recommendable.
Point of View Online: http://www.pointofview-online.com/

Point Of View GTX 670 Specifications:

Graphics Engine : GTX670 (28nm)
Interface : PCI-Express 3.0
Video memory : 2048 MB DDR5
Base clock : 915 Mhz
Boost clock : 980 Mhz
Memory clock : 6008 Mhz
CUDA cores : 1344
Memory bus : 256 bit
DVI-I : 2x dual link
HDMI : 1x mini-HDMI
DisplayPort : 1x
*credits to Fakuryu, TPC and guru3d.com