Impressive Overclocking Performance

Overclocking the new Kepler-based graphics cards is a bit different than we have seen previously and if you haven’t seen our analysis of the process and the changes that NVIDIA has introduced yet, you should definitely check out our page on overclocking from the GTX 680 review.  

For our overclocking we used the same software that we used with the GTX 680 and the GTX 690 – EVGA’s Precision X, version 3.0.0.  The GTX 670 only supports pumping up the power target to 122% (as opposed to 135% on the GTX 680) though the clock offset will stretch further than you’ll likely be able to hit.  In my testing, I was able to run with a 175 MHz (!!) clock offset, giving us a new base of 1090 MHz, which is 19% higher than the base clock of 915 MHz.  That also means that our top Boost clock would jump from 980 MHz to 1155 MHz.

The monitoring software in Precision X gives us a LOT of great information.

In our testing we were able to see clocks go as high as 1260 MHz while playing Battlefield 3 – an increase of 345 MHz over the reference base clock – a 37% increase over that 915 MHz standard setting.  This is the promise of GPU Boost and also shows a lot of clocking headroom on the GTX 670 for gamers (and card vendors) to take advantage of.

With our overclocked speeds we see a 15% improvement in our 3DMark11 GPU score, bringing it higher than the GTX 680.

Overclocking gives us a 8-9% average frame rate increase in Battlefield 3, putting the GTX 670 in range of the GTX 680.

Metro 2033 scales by about 6% in our overclocked settings, another great result for a free performance upgrade. 

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