Gainward GeForce GTX 670 Phantom Pro Reviews

At £330, the Gainward GTX 670 2GB Phantom is priced extremely well; it offers around ten per cent extra performance over a stock GTX 670 2GB, and retails for around ten per cent more than one too - we can’t say much fairer for that. It’s also well priced against other competing cards - only the GTX 680 2GB and the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition outperform the Phantom regularly, and they both retail for around £380. Outside of price and performance however, things become a little less clear cut. The cooler for example (which is arguably what your extra £30 buys you, given that you could apply the Phantom’s overclock to any old GTX 670 2GB) is a triple slot model, meaning the card is less flexible than a stock card. We could forgive the chunky cooler if it was particularly quiet, but it’s not; the fans spin up to easily audible levels during gaming. As a consequence, the GTX 670 2GB Phantom is difficult to recommend, despite being based on an excellent GPU and offering good performance. This is because you'll be better off with a stock card, unless you don’t particularly care about noise or are reluctant to apply your own overclock.

With two GTX 670 graphics cards we can save more than 200 euros and gain similar performance to GTX 680 SLI. We need to overclock those GTX 670 cards off course, but for those who do not want to deal with overclocking, two GTX 670 Phantom cards are a viable option. The GTX 670 Phantom sports a factory overclocked GPU which is set at 1006MHz, and this is exactly the same clock used on the GTX 680. Performance of a single GTX 670 Phantom graphics card is close to that of GTX 680 but not the same, mainly because GTX 680 has 1536 CUDA cores while GTX 670 has 1344. We haven't noticed any significant difference in games except in tessellation heavy tests. Memory subsystems on both cards are the same 256-bit ones and each card has 2GB of GDDR5 memory. As expected, GTX 670 SLI power consumption is a bit lower compared to the GTX 680 SLI.

The GeForce GTX 670 has made our job easy, as there is very little to critique. Based on results from the dozen games we tested, Nvidia achieved its goal of matching the Radeon HD 7970'soutput, while remaining priced against the more affordable HD 7950 at $399. This assuming the latest Kepler card will actually become available at its intended price point over the coming weeks, unlike the GTX 680. Besides concerns about its availability and true street price, we're thrilled with the GTX 670 as it was 15% faster than the HD 7950 on average and on par with the HD 7970. It also bested Nvidia's last-gen single-GPU flagship by 21% at 2560x1600 and it was only 6% slower than the GTX 680 while being 20% cheaper -- awesome news for value-minded enthusiasts who still want top-end performance.