EVGA GTX 670 FTW Signature 2 Review

[jmaster299]

I've had my GPU for a little over a year now, and I am well aware it's not the best card on the market. But, it has been an outstanding card, handling everything I ask it to with flying colors. I should hopefully be upgrading my system soon so I thought I'd share my experience with this card. Link to the Newegg product page as it's no longer listed on EVGA's website: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130843

 

I don't mess around with overclocking my GPU's. The minor performance gain is not worth it IMO. Nothing against people who do OC their GPU's, it's just a matter of personal preference. Add to that the fact that GPU Boost adds a minor overclock to the GPU all on it's own. From day one the max boost frequency of my card has been 1176MHz, nearly 100MHz above the advertised 1084Mhz boost clock. I can't say how much of a difference it makes, but it's nice to see GPU Boost working as advertised.

 

I use a rather aggressive fan curve, so I can hear the fans when under load, but not until they get above 50%. I could easily run with warmer temps and lower fan speeds if I was concerned about noise. As it is with my fan curve, I've never gone above 65c. With my max temps normally sitting around 61c. Any way you look at it, the ACX cooler from EVGA does a stellar job.

My current monitor is only 1680x1050, so my 670 has been more than enough in terms of performance. I am only looking to upgrade my GPU since I will be upgrading my monitor as well. I ran a couple of performance benchmarks. Arkham Origins has a lot of bugs since it was a cash grab by WB while Rocksteady was working on Arkham Knight, but it's still a good way to benchmark Physx. If Physx isn't important to you feel free to skip this part, but it is an important feature to me.

Two screen shots for Arkham Origins. One is the results of the in-game benchmark and a second showing my in-game settings. As I stated before my monitor resolution is only 1680x1050, but I run the game with x4 MSAA and Physx set to high. Motion Blur is disabled simply because I don't like it and I wanted to run the benchmark with the exact same settings as I play the game at.






Next I ran the Valley benchmark. I used downsampling by increasing my monitor resolution beyond the 1680x1050 limit so I could run Valley using the Extreme HD Preset. With a score of 1804, it's on the high side for other 670 benchmarks that I have seen. I have no idea if downsampling affects that or not, but it was the only way I could run a valid Extreme HD Preset.



I've been using EVGA cards for a long time now and have every intention of sticking with the brand. Love or hate EVGA/Nvidia how ever you wish, my experience with them has been nothing short of exemplary, so I have no reason to switch. Depending on what my budget ends up being, I will be upgrading to either a x2 770 FTW or x2 780 FTW SLI setup on a 144MHz gaming monitor.