MSI N670 PE 2GD5 Pro Reviews

Overall this is a great card at a competitive price when looking at only other GTX 670 products. When we start to include the latest HD 7970 and HD 7950 price cuts, the GTX 670 PE starts to lose some of its luster. Still, for die-hard NVIDIA fans this is going to be a great card for them. Most other consumers will really want to weigh overall performance in the games they tend to play vs. that of overall price. Gamers looking for Surround gaming solutions will really want to take a look at cards featuring 3 GB to 4 GB of memory onboard. MSI has produced a really good card at a very competitive price in the GTX 670 market. It has enough features to really pull it ahead of the crowd at those prices, and the performance it brings is really outstanding in a wide variety of applications (except when it falls down in DiRT Showdown). Keep a close eye on this one, as it could be quite popular at retail. Also keep a close look at prices, as some new surprises are on the way.

MSI's GTX 670 Power Edition is another formidable custom-design GTX 670 implementation. Thanks to its overclock out of the box, it matches performance of NVIDIA's much more expensive GTX 680 spot on. Compared to the stock GTX 670, the performance increase is 7% averaged over all our benchmarks. MSI's Twin Frozr IV cooler does a great job keeping the card cool, temperatures are low, even at the increased clock speeds of the Power Edition. While idle fan noise is whisper quiet, noise under load is not optimal in my opinion. We've seen other GTX 670 cards deliver a much quieter experience under load, it looks like MSI keeps favouring lower temperatures over low noise as recent reviews have shown. GPU overclocking potential of the card was in the typical range of overclocks we've seen on other cards, memory is just a bit lower, but the impact is relatively small. Considering that MSI is using a close-to-reference PCB design that just uses a larger PCB, these differences could be random though. Price-wise, MSI's card is available in retail at $430, which is not unreasonable, other overclocked GTX 670s come at similar pricing. Given the currently available custom GTX 670 designs from other manufacturers, most of which are very good, I think it wouldn't hurt MSI if they dropped their price another 10 bucks or so, to draw more attention.

In typical fashion we find ourselves extremely impressed with what MSI is offering us with the Power Edition version of the NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 670. It's overclocking ability and cooler help separate it from a lot of other video cards that try to stand out these days. One of the cool things, though, about the Power Edition here today is that outside of its overclocking ability, the clocks that MSI offer out of the box are one of the strongest on the market, which we have seen so far. If you're not interested in doing the overclocking yourself and you just want something that is going to be faster than a reference video card out of the box, this is a really good option thanks to that 1019MHz core that comes out ahead of so many other brands. Combined with the Twin Frozr cooler, you've got yourself a really strong video card. On the topic of the cooler, as you'd expect, the latest iteration of the Twin Frozr cooler, the Twin Frozr IV, is a strong option. With the latest line up of GPUs running cooler than ever, these high performance cooling options from companies do a fantastic job of keeping our temperatures at reasonable levels, even when more voltage is pumped.