Gigabyte GTX670 OC Video Card Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Thursday, May 10, 2012
Card Uncovered
There are four screws holding the Windforce cooler in place making it rather easy to remove. With the cooler removed you can clearly see the tiny GTX 670 GPU surrounded by memory chips in the typical ring configuration.
The Windforce cooling solution is quite impressive and features three extremely large heatipipes in a core contact configuration. Core contact designs react quickly to rapid changes in load but tend to have a limit in terms of overall capacity. Good thing the Kepler architecture has a lower TDP!
There is a connected heatspreader to cool the memory using the typical thermal pad solution. PWM cooling is not part of the primary Windforce cooler but instead can be found mounted directly to the PCB. This is actually a good thing for a variety of reasons. For instance when dealing with heatpipe coolers it is important to have a single heat contact as it will tend to cool better. Had the PWM been included in the design the overall cooler wouldn't be as efficient.
The next benefit would be for those of you planning to watercool or do some extreme overclocking. Of course to do this you must first remove the Windforce cooler and having the PWM heatsink separate saves you from having to locate a replacement on your own.
There is a connected heatspreader to cool the memory using the typical thermal pad solution. PWM cooling is not part of the primary Windforce cooler but instead can be found mounted directly to the PCB. This is actually a good thing for a variety of reasons. For instance when dealing with heatpipe coolers it is important to have a single heat contact as it will tend to cool better. Had the PWM been included in the design the overall cooler wouldn't be as efficient.
The next benefit would be for those of you planning to watercool or do some extreme overclocking. Of course to do this you must first remove the Windforce cooler and having the PWM heatsink separate saves you from having to locate a replacement on your own.
One of the factors that limited how much the GTX 680 could be overclocked was the size of the reference PWM. Due to the lower power requirements Nvidia determined that a 4-phase design would be enough to drive the card and still remain stable. The GV-N670OC-2GD builds on this and comes with a 5-phase PWM to support the factory overclock and whatever else you might throw at it.
The Nvidia power configuration for the GTX 670 was 6pin + 6pin however since this is an overclocked card Gigabyte has increased the power drive to include a 8pin + 6pin power configuration. This should really help stabilize higher overclocks and help differentiate the N670OC from other cards in its class.
The Nvidia power configuration for the GTX 670 was 6pin + 6pin however since this is an overclocked card Gigabyte has increased the power drive to include a 8pin + 6pin power configuration. This should really help stabilize higher overclocks and help differentiate the N670OC from other cards in its class.
