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670... first thoughts

His heaven score isn't that low. A gtx 580 with the best cpu money can buy will still get a much lower score than 69fps with the settings he used.

The reason you are not seeing a difference in the games you play is simply because they are not demanding enough to test the graphics card so your cpu reaches its max output first.
The 670 will still give you approx 2 - 3 times the fps in a gpu demanding game even though your cpu may be a slight bottleneck.

Okay I'll try to explain it better.

There is 2 things that determine your fps in games. Your cpu and your graphics card. Some games are more cpu heavy and others are more gpu heavy. L4D2 is almost completely reliant on cpu power at the resolution you play at but if you increased your resolution/settings , your 280 would drop a lot whereas with the 670 fps would be unaffected. Either the gpu or cpu will reach its max fps output first.

You said you saw a 10 fps increase in world of tanks. This is likely because your 280 was slightly bottlenecking your cpu before. Now that you have a graphics card which is a lot stronger, it allows the cpu to perform at its best which in this case is 10 fps more. If you upgraded your cpu it would allow your 670 to perform a lot better ( I don't know how cpu dependent world of tanks is, but upgrading to a true quad core like a 2500k might make a big difference) If you did this with your 280 though, you would see no difference in fps as the graphics card was the limit before.

Say you are getting 45 fps now which is a 10fps increase from the 280.

The max fps in that game with a 280 is 35
with an i3 530 it's 45 (what your getting now)
with a 670 it's 100 (just a guess)
and say you changed to a 2500k it could have a max of 75 (just a guess, 670 still may not reach its max fps, but its a lot better)

It's impossible to have a perfectly balanced system as it all depends on the game. Your cpu is slightly weak for your gpu, but its not an awful combination. To allow the 670 to reach its full potential though, you would need a newer cpu such as a 2500k. Here is the i3 530 vs a 2500k

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/118?vs=288 - as you can see some games benefit a lot, while others only see a small increase.
 
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That is why at 1920x1080 or such resolutions a new card is seldom a good upgrade nowadays. People expect to be blown away but in real use not much difference.
 
I'm just ranting, ignore me :p

World of Tanks is single threaded I believe, hugely processor dependant. I just thought the 670 would bridge the gap more than it did, ya know.

*trots off to look at i7 prices*
 
I'm not being funny or anything but are you actually checking things/ doing things that people have suggested?

There's no acknowledgement or anything...
 
s0ck said:
Not impressed.

I've upgraded from a 280. I play @ 1680/120Hz.

L4D2 = I seem to have less FPS if anything. At best, it's around the same. I'm occasionally dipping into the 50s. WTF. It used to be around 120 more or less solid.

World of tanks. 45fps with everything turned on. 50-150 with most things turned off. There is probably an increase of 10fps here 'across the board'.

Quakelive is unaffected, as you'd expect for a 20~ year old game.

CPU is an i3-530 @ 3.3GHz.

Was I expecting too much? Driver issue (301.42)? £350 down and I feel like this was a pointless upgrade.
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While it there are other possible cause for the GTX670 not performing as it should be, but I can assure you that your i3 530 at 3.3GHz ain't fast enough to scale well with the GTX670 and WILL hold it back in games. If you got a decent CPU cooler on your i3 530, you can overclock it much further. Most i3 5xx would overclocked to at least 4.2GHz, and some can even up to 4.5-4.6GHz if pushed hard.
 
spixelspixel said:
His heaven score isn't that low. A gtx 580 with the best cpu money can buy will still get a much lower score than 69fps with the settings he used.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what was wrong with your computer when you had a 670, but I get high 1800's-1900 out of the box with a 670 at 1080p... it should have a much higher score than 1750 at 1680x1050
 
andybird123 said:
I'm not sure what was wrong with your computer when you had a 670, but I get high 1800's-1900 out of the box with a 670 at 1080p... it should have a much higher score than 1750 at 1680x1050
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+1

and to the OP, I feel your pain but a decent I5 will have you gaming nicely. No need for an I7 unless you intend on doing stuff like CAD or Video editing.
 
Just to add...the lower frame rate for L4D2 (or you think you got) is most likely CPU side limited and just variables (like more zombies on screen at the same time), as source games has always been more CPU demanding.

As for World of Tank, it is again CPU limited due despite it is a relatively CPU demanding game, it only uses ONE core.

If you upgraded to GTX670 for the said two games hoping to improve frame rate, I'm afraid you have upgraded the wrong hardware.

As I mentioned before...if you can overclocked your i3 530 rto 4.2-4.5GHz, you will definitely get some very noticable improvement on frame rate.
 
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s0ck said:
Most of you will not remember the days of going from a Voodoo2 to a GeForce 1. Even on the same processor (Celeron 300 / Pentium II), the performance difference was STAGGERING. This was true innovation.
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The original Geforce wasn't much better than the Voodoo 2 despite coming out almost two years later, in fact with a decent CPU the Voodoo would actually better the GF because of its polished Glide API. It was the Geforce 2 that kicked things into high gear.

------

here's my (odd) advice:

Return the 670 under DSR and get your £350 back, buy a i5 3570K (£167.99), a 2x4GB 8GB memory kit (£34.99) and a Z77 motherboard (£75.98). You have £75.98 left (if you don't want to OC you can get a B75 board and have £100 left) sell your old CPU for ~£50 plus whatever you get for the MB/ram, say at least £75 total, you now have £150 (£175 if B75), buy a 560ti or a HD7850 depending on your preference, sell the GTX280.

You have change left over and are in a much much better position than you are now (the 670 is total overkill at 16x10 res).
 
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flopper said:
That is why at 1920x1080 or such resolutions a new card is seldom a good upgrade nowadays. People expect to be blown away but in real use not much difference.
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Not true.

I game at 1920x1200. I upgraded from a [email protected] & a 5870, to a 3570k and a 670 and there is a world of difference.

Especially in BF3, where I can max the settings and its smooth as butter.
 
Lol, laptop owners have effectively upgraded from 560ti (Oced 580M) to 670 (Oced 680M) recently and the difference is huge at 1080p.
 
^ pretty good advice, although he could go for a cheaper p67 board and 2500k and not notice the performance difference. Also try and upgrade to a cheap 1080p monitor too :)
 
Run afterbuner and see what utilisation the GPU has during games.

Thats the easiest way to see if your using the GPU fully or bottlenecked by other components.

Without frame rate limiter, or v-synch your GPU should be running at max utilisation. If your GPU util is running significantly under 100% its being held back by other components.
 
I recently made a similar upgrade to the OP.

Have an i3 550 (overclocked to 4.2ghz iirc), went from a GTX 460 to a GTX 670.

My experience is that BF3 saw a significant improvement, however Team Fortress 2 still had a lot of frame drops as before. The reason is pretty clear, I'm cpu bound as well (TF2 is very cpu heavy)... enabling multithreading in TF2 helped a lot, however this made it crash occasionally so I'm limited to 1 core.

My current plan is to replace it with either an i5 or i7 (depending on what I can get cheap for my socket 1156 mobo). Then either cross my fingers and hope multithreading will work without the instability in TF2, or hope that these cpus will be a little faster than my overclocked i3 (assuming I overclock the new one) anyway. It's an annoying situation though, as there's probably no guarantee I'll see a huge improvement in this game even if I do replace my cpu! Replacing the mobo etc isn't really an option right now :/

edit: Oh and, I'm running at 1080p on a 120hz monitor...so the higher the framerate the better to be honest haha
 
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andybird123 said:
I'm not sure what was wrong with your computer when you had a 670, but I get high 1800's-1900 out of the box with a 670 at 1080p... it should have a much higher score than 1750 at 1680x1050
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Doubt it unless you have a factory overclocked card or not running the right settings. Test it again with 1920x1080 4AA 4AF, tess normal at stock and your fps will be 68-69.

I already said he should have a higher score with 1680x1050 ... which is around 77.

My 570 at stock scores 50 fps at 1680x1050, 570 sli was 93.
My 580 scored 57
His 670 is getting 69 when it should be 77, so like I said, it's performing a lot better than a 580, it's being bottlenecked but not massively. Nothing wrong with my computer or 670 :)
 
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