NVIDIA blew reviewers away with its flagship GTX 680, but building cards for the low-end is a whole different challenge. The GT 640 hits the $99 price point, where it sits right between the AMD Radeon HD 7750 at $109 and the last-gen Radeon 6670 at around $80. As it turns out, these rivals pull off something of a pincer movement, leaving NVIDIA's card little room to retaliate. The GT 640 contains a 28nm Kepler chip, but it's a cutdown version of the silicon with just 384 CUDA cores, a poor memory bandwidth of 28.5GB/s and no GPU Boost feature -- which means the card can't boost its 900MHz to make use of thermal headroom. These limitations have a significant impact on the benchmarks, as you'll see in our little review roundup after the break.
NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 review roundup: a $99 card that fails to keep Kepler's promise originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jun 2012 14:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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While the world still waits for the GTX 680 to reach Newegg, NVIDIA has pushed ahead with the next card down in its stack: the $399 GTX 670. This more affordable option keeps most of the main Kepler credentials intact, but it necessarily makes a few compromises on the computational side, with fewer processing cores (1344 instead of 1536) and texture units (112 instead of 128) as well as slower base clock speed (915MHz instead of 1006MHz). Is that likely to be a problem? Judging from reviewers' responses published today, which cover cards from a range of vendors, probably not. In fact, as TechSpot puts it, "there's very little to critique," because the GTX 670 matches the performance of AMD's flagship Radeon HD 7970 at a much lower price. AnandTech's benchmarks put the reference board only ten percent (or a handful of fps) behind the GTX 680 in many recent games, leaving it "nipping at the 7970's heels," but it was still plenty powerful enough to play Arkham City or Battlefield 3 at 5760 x 1200 with high settings. PCPer's stats put the new card 15 to 20 percent behind the 680, but found good scaling in SLI mode. The Tech Report found the the GTX 670's cheap stock cooler let it down slightly, with a "friction-filled" idle noise well above the top-end Radeons and even above the dual-GPU GTX 690 -- but under load it conducted itself relatively well. We could go on, but ultimately if you're looking to buy this card then you'll want to do your own research at the links below, and then do a raindance.
Read - TechSpot
Read - AnandTech
Read - The Tech Report
Read - PC Per
Read - HotHardware
Read - Tom's Hardware
Read - Hexus
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 review round-up: 'just get here if you can' originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 May 2012 09:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Continue reading An early look at Ivy Bridge motherboards: or, the side order without the main
An early look at Ivy Bridge motherboards: or, the side order without the main originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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HotHardware, Tom's Hardware, ExtremeTech, The Tech Report | Email this | Comments