Impressive! I'm building a new PC at the turn of the new year, and this card just made my short-list.

I'm definitely all for paying for a great cooler. It will easily eat up the ~$50 difference (and more in labour) if you try to get an aftermarket one on there - IF you can get an aftermarket cooler on there.

The issue of efficiency was raised, and I think it's a good one: I favour low-draw cards because they keep ambient temperatures comfortable. It could be argued that it matters little after a certain point in wattage, but I would say it'll become even more obvious after you cross the ventilation and cooling threshold of your workspace/gaming corner. This is something worth considering for someone who does more with the computer than sweat their ass off in high-FPS, high-adrenaline gaming sessions.

The above could be one reason to choose a 670 over a 680. I know it was the main reason why I chose a GeForce 650 Ti over a Radeon HD 7850.

I've been running this card since August, and have been very impressed with its quietness. I have it in a Bitfenix Prodigy case that is sitting on the left side of my monitor. So the VGA fans are directly up against a vent, but on the far side of the case. All my components are best-of-breed in terms of noise, except that I haven't yet soft mounted the WD Green WD20EARS beyond the minimally-rubberized stock drive sled. That HDD is, by far, the noisiest part of the system. If I let it idle to sleep, the PC is inaudible.

OTOH, my sample does freeze a lot in all sorts of games. It's not a cooling issue. My temp/RPM numbers match those in the review. An RMA is probably called for.

That freezing... are you sure it's the card? Is it BSOD or CTD (Crash To Desktop) or just intermittent jamming that doesn't crash the system or the game?

1) GFX driver issue or RAM. Update card drivers/BIOS, clean old&obsolete drivers, Memtest.
2) Could be anything. Update and clean everything. Do not use overclocking software - make sure no automatic overclocking going on, especially with motherboard. Remove all such software, especially motherboard.
3) RAM or HDD swapping. Memtest, use SSD.

That's just off the top of my head. This is off-topic so further troubleshooting probably needs to get done elsewhere, but more often than not in my experience it is not the card's hardware at fault these days.

A few months ago my brother's Nvidia GTX570 graphics card began crashing in nearly all games. Before then it had been a fairly stable card with no major issues for a few years. Games like Sniper Elite 2 and Assassins Creed 3 were basically unplayable as they would crash within minutes. It seems to be related to the newer Nvidia graphics card drivers somehow.

What worked for his card was to use the MSI Afterburner software to increase the Nvidia GTX570 graphics card's core voltage to 1100mV. The card was also temporarily downclocked to 50mhz below the stock GPU speed as a test.

http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm

After making these changes there hasn't been any crashing in games at all on that PC. Because it was working stably the GPU clocks were returned to stock and the core voltage lowered to 1075mV without any ill effects. It's worth trying.

Have a look at this thread on the subject of Nvidia crashes also:

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topi ... eed-3-cod/

The Nvidia GTX670 looks like quite a good card, largely because it uses less power so the fans don't have to spin up as much. The downside of the Nvidia GTX570 with stock cooler is that it makes a real racket in 3d mode. It's quiet in 2d mode on the desktop but the roaring from it is hard to ignore when it's running a game.

Hmm if the 670 DirectCu does so well in the silent department, does it mean that the 660Ti and 660 DirectCu versions will do the same or better? Anyone has one of those and can share some impressions?

CA_Steve has been hard at work compiling reviews for the junior cards. You can find them here (660) and here (660 Ti).

An excerpt from Techpowerup, one of the more respectable review sites:
It's not SPCR-accurate of course, but it is a decent relative comparison from a source that take their reviews seriously.

I saw those of course (thanks CA_Steve btw), I was just hoping I'll get an opinion from a fellow SPCR reader, who would be more likely to have the same ideas about low noise as me
It would be nice to upgrade my video card and not have to buy a 3rd party cooler for a change - running a GTS450 with an Accelero Xtreme something at the moment.

While it won't approach what can be managed passively aftermarket, one approach if the stock cooler is too loud is simply to replace the fan(s) on it with a low noise 120mm fan. The large flat heatsinks that most modern cards have allow this modification. It might be zip tied on but it will be quieter.

Sure - you can send a donation to...

What I've seen from reading a LOT of reviews, is that Asus (as well as the other guys) put all of a certain class of coolers under a brand umbrella, even though they have different fans, different fan profiles, different heatsinks, different number of heat pipes, and whether or not they include a front or backplate for stiffening and VRM/RAM cooling. So, just because Asus calls the cooler Direct CU II on one GPU, it doesn't mean the one they call Direct CU II on a different GPU will look or act the same. You'll still need to look at the reviews.

OT, but... what Steve said is my main problem with the Asus cooler scheme: it's an umbrella term, and you do not know what exactly you are getting. I like MSI in this regard.

I like MSI as well, but they also play the game with the TwinFrozr series.

Aye, but at least there's less variety from what I can see. They do try with the generation numbers.

I want one

I got one.... but it seems to be a lemon.

I picked one up after the recommendation of this review and based on the fact that nVidia's 660/670/680 series cards tend to use less power than the AMD 7800/7900 series in 2D mode when multiple monitors are connected. After uninstalling AMD's drivers and running a driver sweep in safe mode, I booted back into Windows with the 670 only to experience serious stability issues at the desktop. With only one monitor connected, I would get occasional black-screen hiccup (monitor goes blank for 1-5 seconds, returns to normal). With more than one monitor connected (I have three - I tried all permutations), there was some serious screen tearing. The entire system was completely unusable in this state. After uninstalling the nVidia drivers and 670 and re-installing my 7950, my system returned to normal stability.

I'll see if I can get the card replaced tomorrow. The store I usually go to is pretty good with exchanges on defective equipment. I'll see if I can take some power measurements with my system as it is now before swapping out the card for some multi-monitor power usage comparison.

That all being said, it was extremely quiet during all these issues.

I've seen advice regarding those kinds of hiccups. The tips I recall were to set power management to Maximum Performance (essentially disable all powersaving features) and uninstall/undo all overclocking (except factory OC).

Brings to mind the black screen -> "driver has stopped working" issue not long ago that took forever to fix.

I'm well aware that there are some performance-setting "fixes" for these kinds of issues, but IMO, this shouldn't be something necessary for the user to do - especially on a premium $400 video card (the only more expensive at the moment options being the 7970 and 680). I've run into my fair share of idle-clockspeed issues with multiple monitors before (on both ATI- and nVidia-based systems), but I shouldn't ever be running into issues a single monitor setup (which almost everyone is going to have).

My Radeon 6870, 7870, and 7950 cards have all worked out-of-the-box with my triple monitor setup.

I totally agree with you. This is nothing but a manufacturer cock-up, coming on the heels of another apparent cock-up. I just thought I'd mention the fixes I've seen mentioned, just in case; I always learn to not underestimate people, then learn to start from basics, then to not underestimate people, then to start from the basics, then...

Amazingly quiet Graphics Card from Asus, thanks for the excellent review. I think it's a good choice that you're not making benchmarks of the Graphics Cards, since that is so heavily done on all the other sites.

With that said there's a raging debate about the performance of the 7970/7970 GHZ Edition versus the GTX 670/680. I believe there is more raw power in the 7970, and therefore went with one of these, the Gigabyte GVR797OC-3GD. Price was even lower than the GTX 670, and it's clocked similarly to a 7970 GHZ Edition. The Windforce three-fan cooler is quiet out of the box, but can be made inaudible using custom fan control. I would recommend doing a review of this particular 7970 card.

The problem with Ati^H^H^HAMD cards is that they're still operating with reduced functionality - if at all - if you run linux and, to a lesser extent, a hackintosh - and i do both. Software fan control is also useless if you dual/triple boot since it tends to only run on windows. So, nvidia it is for me.

To some degree yes. I'd venture to say that AMD has made more advancements recently on the driver front than nVidia (Linus hasn't been all too happy with them lately). Bleeding edge hardware support for Linux is also something that's yet to reach the mainstream market. It's too small of a user base to really invest heavily in, and until the demand from consumers is there, the development won't magically appear. I can't say anything for recent releases, but getting my old 8800GT to work smoothly under Fedora took quite a bit of tinkering. I also spent about a week trying to get multiple monitors to work at all before just giving up. Both AMD and nVidia have had their fair share of driver issues along the way for both Linux and Windows (I have no experience with hackintosh builds).

To follow up on my previous post, I got my RMA yesterday and got a quick chance to test it out. This card worked fine at the desktop with a single monitor(although there was some noticeable coil whine when my case was open). However, I ran into similar issues with multiple monitors connected. I ended up returning the card this afternoon and switching back to my 7950.

Even with the massive 310 driver performance improvements?
http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/Releases/N ... g-8ac.aspx


I wouldn't say there has been much difference from NVIDIA for many years on this but changes from Xorg and others have sometimes made the journey harder or simpler. It is also heavily dependant upon your distro and how you install the graphics drivers. I use Arch and they are very good at keeping rolling with the NVIDIA release schedule. For older cards you can get 175 and 304 series from AUR. I do this when required and then set an ignore on Linux and Xorg so that no upgrade can break the obsolete graphics drivers.

That may be, but from what I've seen the 310 series have caused their own issues on 670 and 680 cards in certain Windows games. Like I said before, both camps have had their issues, and in my opinion, AMD has been making more consistent progress.

I understand that there are certain distros that are better than others when it comes to driver support, but the market fragmentation is precisely the issue that is preventing Linux from achieving mainstream adoption. Furthermore, as an end-user, I really don't want to have to worry about a kernel update potentially botching my graphics drivers (which was one of the many issues I ran into with Fedora way back when).

On the other hand, AMD has it's own share of issues that it needs to deal with before really focusing resources on providing even more support for a very limited market.

An not so precise update to my initial question in this thread:
I ended up buying an Asus Geforce 650 DirectCu and it's pretty damn quiet. I'd say the Accelero at 7V i had before is more quiet, and neither options are as quiet as a fully passive card, but this retail card is acceptable. I haven't heard it spin the fans up in games yet.
Running an ivy bridge core i7, the aforementioned card, a nexus 5000 PSU in an Antec one hundred case with just one of the stock fans on low.