GIGABYTE GV-N670OC-2GD Pro Reviews

The GIGABYTE GTX 670 has a significant leg up on the competition with its factory overclock, custom cooling solution, and pricing parity with reference model GTX 670 video cards. It was able to provide enough performance to deliver at 2560x1600 resolution across our entire test suite of games while wiping the floor with AMD’s "equivalent offerings." If you have a healthy $400 budget to upgrade your video card, you will be hard pressed to find a better value than the GIGABYTE GTX 670. We certainly would like to see this price point fall back a little considering no "GTX 660Ti" is yet to make it to market.

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 670 remains our preferred high-end graphics solution; it offers bags of performance at around £300 and would serve as a worthy addition to almost any gaming PC. The reference card's GTX 680-like formula delivers potent in-game talent, but some of NVIDIA's big-name partners have shown that there's room for further enhancement. Gigabyte is usually at the forefront of any such developments and has delivered once again with the GeForce GTX 670 WindForce 3X. There's admittedly little adventure here - Gigabyte has taken NVIDIA's second-rung GPU, given it a modest overclock and planted it in the middle of an existing WindForce 3X design - but that takes nothing away from the end result. The card looks impressive while keeping within a dual-slot form factor, it cools admirably, it delivers a level of performance that's practically identical to a premium GeForce GTX 680, and it's priced competitively.

GIGABYTE's GTX 670 OC is one of the best GTX 670 cards available right now. It comes with an overclock out of the box, that is moderate compared to other custom 670s, but is still high enough to bring overall performance to within 2% of the much more expensive GTX 680. The card has plenty of headroom for additional manual overclocking, even though the maximum GPU clock seems a bit lower on our sample than on other GTX 670 cards we tested. On the other hand, we see outstanding memory overclocking potential, breaking 1900 MHz easily, reaching 1925 MHz which sets a new memory clock records for all graphics cards tested here at TPU. GIGABYTE's Windforce cooler works extremely well and provides low temperatures as well as super low noise levels. In idle the card is actually the quietest GTX 670 we tested so far, only under load it has to give in to the ASUS 670 DC II which is quieter in that test. There are no nasty surprises with power consumption, thanks to the use of the GTX 680 reference design PCB. Only Furmark maximum power is increased, which is actually a good thing, since it shows that GIGABYTE made use of the increased power capability provided by the 6+8 PCIe power configuration.

In the grand scheme of all things graphics card related, Gigabyte’s WindForce OC is something of a freak. Typically, overclocked, custom cooled GPUs come with one of two things: a high cost and leading edge clock speeds or a lower price and somewhat meaningless performance increases. Yet this one doesn’t offer either of those scenarios, which makes it one of the best GTX 670s currently on the market. Instead of coming to market with yet another entry level reference-based product, Gigabyte’s sole effort (for the time being at least) is the WindForce OC featured in today’s article. Normally, that would be cause for concern since a highly custom card usually demands a premium. But not this time. Instead, you get class leading performance, a cooling solution that’s more fitting of a GTX 680 rather than its smaller brother and a board design that one ups nearly everything else currently available. And it doesn’t cost a penny more than NVIDIA’s $399 MSRP. Now that’s what we call a value added proposition.

Considering the performance versus value, this is one impressive card. For single core GPU cards, the GIGABYTE GTX 670 OC has almost identical performance as the GTX 680 reference board (and we are talking within 1% deviation range here). With overclocking and even at factory settings the one missing SMX core is barely noticeable unless under special circumstances (in this case the DirectX10 game Just Cause 2). Selling for $415, that's a bold $85 savings (reference Nvidia GTX 680's sell for about $500). GIGABYTE took great care in crafting a simply awesome thermal solution and there is no hiding the quality of the Windforce 3X design. Even though there was not any radical changes made to the video card (besides a decent 12% factory boost clock), at this level there really doesn't need to be any made. Overall, if you are in the market for an upgrade, the Gigabyte GTX 670 OC is a serious contender and should be at the top of the list.