Introduction:
NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 670 around 10 months ago on May 10, 2012. The green team used a quick launch plan for their GK104 line-up. The GTX 680 was the first GK104 GPU and it launched March 22, 2012, the GTX 690 followed after 6 week on May 3, 2012 and only a week later the GTX 670 surfaced. With this launch plan, the company quickly captured three important segments of the market.
The GeForce GTX 670 shares same Kepler design and features as the GTX 680 but infact it’s very similar to its bigger brother. Usually, NVIDIA’s second tier performance graphics cards have quite a lot of components missing as compared to highest end one but in case of GTX 670, they only disabled an SMX and lowered the clicks a bit and that’s all. Memory bandwidth, size and everything else is exactly same. It comes with a core clock of 915 MHz and boost clock of 980 MHz; this is 9% and 7% lower than the respective clocks of GTX 680. TDP of GTX 670 is 170W, which is 25W lower than the GTX 680. All in all, at reference clocks the GTX 670 has 91% of ROP performance, 80% of shader performance and 100% of memory performance of the GTX 680. The most surprising part of the GTX 670 is its PCB size which is only 6.75 inches. Its PCB size make it the shortest GPU in its class. However, the cooler extends a little over the PCB making the overall length to be 9.5 inches which is a norm these days. The smaller PCB design opens up the possibility of using the GTX 670 in mITX gaming systems and ASUS has already designed a custom variant of GTX 670 whose overall length is 6.75 inches. They have ditched the reference NVIDIA cooler and designed their own DirectCU Mini cooler.
NVIDIA gave full liberty to their partners to launch custom versions of the card right on the actual release date. Furthermore, partners had ample supply of GTX 670 right from the launch day unlike the GTX 680 which faced serious supply issues in early days. The GTX 670 was initially launched at $399 but now it is available for as low as $350. Even though its competitor, the HD 7950, can now be bought for $299, the GTX 670 still seems to be a better product.
We have the Club3D GeForce GTX 670 royalQueen edition with us today. It is based on the reference NVIDIA PCB but its cooler is a custom design with Club3D’s Cool Stream technology. It has a large array of Aluminum fins with two 80mm fans throwing cool air onto the fins. Apart from the cooler, everything in this graphics card is same as the reference one; even the clocks are same.
| AMD Radeon HD 7950 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 | Club3D GeForce GTX 670 royalQueen | AMD Radeon HD 7970 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 | AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stream Processors | 1792 | 1344 | 1344 | 2048 | 1536 | 2048 |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 |
| GPU | Tahiti | GK104 | GK104 | Tahiti | GK104 | Tahiti |
| Transistors | 4.31B | 3.5B | 3.5B | 4.31B | 3.5B | 3.5B |
| Core Clock | 800 MHz | 915 MHz | 915 MHz | 925 MHz | 1006 MHz | 1000 MHz |
| Boost Clock | N/A | 980 MHz | 980 MHz | N/A | 1058 MHz | 1050 MHz |
| Memory Clock | 5 GHz | 6 GHz | 6 GHz | 5.5 GHz | 6 GHz | 6 GHz |
| Memory Bus Width | 384-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 384-bit | 256-bit | 384-bit |
| Memory Size | 3GB | 2GB | 2GB | 3GB | 2GB | 3GB |
| Price | $300 | $350 | £320 | $390 | $450 | $450 |
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