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Which 670/680?

Aedus

Aedus

Aedus

Soldato
Joined
16 Aug 2009
Posts
8,578
Location
Luton, England
I'm looking at getting a 670 or 680 now after my 560Ti has seemingly crashed on me, then selling the replacement I get from gigabyte. I had the SoC version and it's never really been stable but I just upped the memory voltage to fix it. I'm sceptical about getting gigabyte again so the windforce is off of the cards, I'm just wondering what to get. The phantom looks quite good, so does the over clocked KFA2 on this week's deal. I'm not sure if the extra price is worth it. Also I saw there's a pre-order up for a 4Gb version 670 (I game on 1080p so not sure if the extra VRAM is necessary).

Money isn't much of an object, but of course if the 680 isn't much better than the 670 then I'm not going to spend extra money needlessly. Any advice welcome.
 
BeforeI purchased my 670 I did a lot of reading around and looking at benchmarks etc...

There isnt too much in it between an OC 670 or a stock 680.

Get either one of these: Windforce or KFA2

I have a Windforce and it is fantastic.

As I said above, I looked at lots of benchmarks before making my puchase.

Different sites say different things. Some have the OC 670 ahead of the 680 or some have it on average about 5fps behind in average performance.

Overall I think its worth saving the £70-£100 over the 680.

The only reason I would think of going 680 is if I had a monitor resolution higher than 1920x1200 and the 680 came in 3Gb-4Gb vram flavours (at current prices)
 
The 670 is only between 3-7% (very roughly) slower than the 680. It's difficult to recommend one now that the 670 is on sale and at a price point way below the 680. Unless you're interested in having "the best" I would avoid and go for a 670.

Regarding VRAM, you only need 4GB if you're multi-screen gaming and considering going SLI/tri-SLI in the future. If not, then you will almost always run into GPU power limitations before being limited by VRAM.

The Windforce 670's are really the cards to get and the 560Ti issue you mention was across the board if I remember and not a Gigabyte problem. Also Gigabyte's RMA service is acknowledged here to be superb.

Overclocked 670 = roughly on par with a stock 680. However, an overclocked 680 is the figure above faster.

When you're talking (in BF3 terms) around 5% of a framerate of 80ish you can see that the difference is negligible.
 
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I did read up that the 680 wasn't worth the extra over the 670, was just curious about that KFA2 card in particular as the overclock seemed quite decent on it, otherwise it would be a 670 for sure. Is the phantom no good? I'm worried about the gigabyte card because it was just bad from the start, not sure if that's because it was over clocked out of the box or whatever but you still expect it to be stable. Is the windforce really that much better than others? I guess it's down to its cooling solution?
 
I did a lot of reading and it ended up as a toss up between the Windforce or the Asus Direct CU II GTX 670. I ended up with the Asus and it has been great. I imagine that the gigabyte one is also a great card.
I just wanted one without the reference board and good cooling.
 
The overclocked variants of the 680 will get to around my level of overclock if they're lucky (in my signature). Reason being is that Gibbo stated that 680's weren't overclocking as well these days for whatever reason.

The customs don't do anything special in that respect so yes, it's just the cooling and RMA support.

I'm fairly sure the bump in voltage required to stop the crashes on your 560Ti was an across the board problem with all manufacturer's cards.

Gigabyte really are one of the good guys when it comes to after sale support - I wouldn't worry at all about being in their hands.
 
I Guess it's between the windforce, phantom or the KFA2.
Need to verify that it is indeed the GPU which is having problems later, but I am sure it is, as video rendering is taking ages (screen appears black for a while when loading) and artifacts in games are less prevalent when the card is severely underclocked.
It was suggested that it may be my CPU or PSU but I don't think it is, since the memory clock adjustments on the card change the symptoms.
 
670 phantom is shorter length PCB. Avoid IMO.

GB WF is worth the extra over KFA2. Better cooler and longer warranty for £10 more. I think they clock a bit better too on average.
 
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