ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II 4GB SLI Review @ [H]

ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II 4GB SLI Review - We review two ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II 4GB video cards in SLI under NV Surround resolutions. We'll answer the question as to the value and validity of 4GB of RAM on a GeForce GTX 670 GPU video card in SLI. Far Cry 3, Hitman Absolution, and all our other games will be taken to the extreme to get to the bottom of 4GB GTX 670 cards.

Well written review as always.

It's interesting.. I wonder what pushes them to decide to release a card with 4GB of ram...

Because VRAM amount on the box still drives purchases. And to be honest, we are just seeing AA moving away from being VRAM limited, so the landscape is changing somewhat.

Bosom said:

Well written review as always.

It's interesting.. I wonder what pushes them to decide to release a card with 4GB of ram...

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prices and the fact that the higher vram on the box still sells cards when it comes to the lesser educated buyers. things haven't changed much even from the old days when people(even i got baited into it a few times because i honestly didn't know any better at the time) would buy 512mb cards instead of 256mb cards(same with the 256 vs 128mb and so on) thinking it would be way faster when in reality it made no difference since the gpu wasn't powerful enough to actually benefit from all the ram. the 670 4GB still follows that same idea and it'll still sell for the same reasons those 512mb cards sold back in the day.

good review btw, was interesting with the overclock just how close the SLI 670 4GB's got to reaching that performance edge where 4GB of ram started to show a benefit.

At the end of the article you mention Asus also offers a GeForce GTX 670 2GB DirectCU II TOP, but those seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth. I don't know of anywhere that sells them new.

I can still see a use for these. For instance, my GTX 580 is fast enough for everything I play with my monitor resolution being 1680x1050, but what it lacks is VRAM for a highly modded Skyrim. On my 580 with lots of texture mods, I get good frame rates except in certain areas where it severely stutters because of lack of VRAM. I see in reviews that the 670 is slightly faster than the 580 at skyrim, so it follows that a 670 with 4GBs should be good for my case. It's an edge case to a degree, but worth considering since the skyrim scenario (highly modded games on single monitors) is still popular I would guess. Just saying, there *is* a market here, not sure how big but how many buy these high end gpus anyway..?

Running 4 of my 670 4GB cards in 4-way sli has allowed me to make Skyrim playable at 7680x1600 with mods and with TRSSAA and normal AA enabled. Other games it has helped with as well.

That being said, the majority of users won't be seeing the benefit unless you are running 3 or 4 of these cards and pushing large resolutions. Good review.

grats on ability to own 4x 670

Sgraffite said:

At the end of the article you mention Asus also offers a GeForce GTX 670 2GB DirectCU II TOP, but those seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth. I don't know of anywhere that sells them new.

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You should be able to find the OC version a little easier, it's a little less than the TOP, but can easily be overclocked to TOP levels, and beyond. Should be a bit cheaper as well.

I'm missing the Skyrim benchmarks. My most anticipated game is Fallout 4 and I've been using these to help me decide what card to get.

Excellent article. I'm looking forward to the follow-up where you test 3x GTX 670 cards and 3x 3GB 660 Ti.

Why are there never reviews that go up to the resolution I commonly play at - 7680x1440. 2560x1440 monitors available for around 350 apiece have made this far more achievable than in the past, I picked up a triple monitor setup for 1k delivered. Admittedly it isn't every game where I see an advantage to my 4GB cards, but there are some where with the settings I play at I regularly see vram usage top 2GB, I wouldn't want to see my fps drop to single digits while swapping takes place in the middle of, for example, a firefight in BF3.
Every single triple monitor review I have seen maxes out at either 5760x1080 or at best 5760x1200. When they came out almost a year ago it was shown that vram usage almost never breaks 2GB at those resolutions. Even with new games that still holds true, with usage edging up slightly as higher capacity cards have been getting greater market penetration.
While this was certainly well written, I just can't wait until we start seeing reviews showing what happens when you really start pushing pixels.

I would love to see those reviews @ 7680x1440. But i highly doubt it, even if you can get the monitors that cheap, you still need a tri-sli or better setup. All in all, you end up with a 5k machine. And only very few have those.

Still would like to see them go all out.

I only glanced at all but the intro and conclusion but it seems like you ran into spots where you were on that edge of using too much vram. I didn't see any mention of "Disable visual themes" and "Disable desktop composition", however. It's been a while since I actually monitored these things(horrible for a long time [H]er, I know) but I seem to recall getting an extra couple hundred megabytes by changing the compatibility settings on all my game exe's.

Developers aren't going to write games that require 4 gigs of RAM for maximum performance when most cards have two.

Fooshnik said:

Developers aren't going to write games that require 4 gigs of RAM for maximum performance when most cards have two.

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its not about developers writing games to use the memory, its the fact that game developers have found better ways to do things like FXAA that don't require as much vram as it once did. we hit that peak where the vram available has exceeded the performance of the GPU. where as during the HD5k 6k and 400/500 series it was the lack of vram holding back the GPU's. hopefully the 8k and 700 series solves that problem and the cards will be able to actually use all that vram in single/SLI form and not need 3-4 cards to actually use it.

Bosom said:

Well written review as always.

It's interesting.. I wonder what pushes them to decide to release a card with 4GB of ram...

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Have you seen how many people recommend 4GB card for "future proofing" or so people can run some theoretical Skyrim mod? Or how many people recommend AMD cards because they have 3GB of VRAM instead of "only" 2GB? That's why. "Bigger number == better" for a lot of people, whether it actually does or not.

Forceman said:

Have you seen how many people recommend 4GB card for "future proofing" or so people can run some theoretical Skyrim mod? Or how many people recommend AMD cards because they have 3GB of VRAM instead of "only" 2GB? That's why. "Bigger number == better" for a lot of people, whether it actually does or not.

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Why do you call it 'theoretical'? I know for a fact my 1.5GBs on my GTX 580 does not allow me to run the "Skyrim HD 2K" mod, and I've seen someone on newegg say they saw 2.9GBs of VRAM use on their 4GB GTX 680 with Skyrim modded. I would not call that 'theoretical', now it may not apply to everyone, and who recommends 4GB cards because of this anyway? If you're referring to me, I'm simply saying that the people who say there is 0 need for it are wrong, not that everyone needs to run out and buy one.

devil22 said:

Why do you call it 'theoretical'? I know for a fact my 1.5GBs on my GTX 580 does not allow me to run the "Skyrim HD 2K" mod, and I've seen someone on newegg say they saw 2.9GBs of VRAM use on their 4GB GTX 680 with Skyrim modded. I would not call that 'theoretical', now it may not apply to everyone, and who recommends 4GB cards because of this anyway? If you're referring to me, I'm simply saying that the people who say there is 0 need for it are wrong, not that everyone needs to run out and buy one.

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Theoretical in the sense that while many people mention it, few people probably actually use it. Whenever you see a question of whether 2GB is enough, every time, someone brings up "modded Skyrim" as the reason to get a 4GB card.

BTU_Natas said:

I would love to see those reviews @ 7680x1440. But i highly doubt it, even if you can get the monitors that cheap, you still need a tri-sli or better setup. All in all, you end up with a 5k machine. And only very few have those.

Still would like to see them go all out.

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Lol I couldn't afford that - my setup cost about 1k for base components, 1k for my 2way SLI(definitely required, 1 just isn't enough for that res), 1k for the monitors. I expect the monitors to last me several years(hopefully) - definitely not an average comp, but when they are already doing an SLI review on multi monitor setups, they are already like 80% of the way there in cost terms, if not more. Especially since 4k monitors are coming out, this number of pixels is not at all unreasonable to start seeing in peoples setups. I expect to see reviews showing up sometime this year either with 3way surround 1440p, or using one of the new monitors that push huge pixel counts as well.(fingers crossed)

Forceman said:

Theoretical in the sense that while many people mention it, few people probably actually use it. Whenever you see a question of whether 2GB is enough, every time, someone brings up "modded Skyrim" as the reason to get a 4GB card.

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As opposed to 5,700 horizontal pixels? Anyways, it's only a few bucks more it's not like you pay 2x more for 4GBs vs. 2GBs.

Yeps, i payed 30 euro's per card more, to get 4GB instead of 2GB of memory.

So i spend 90 euro's extra, and i think i spent it will. But thats because of tri-sli and the high resolution. Anybody else would just have wasted money.

4GB is useless voor the very big majority of people. But it does sound cool, and what is 30 euro's more worth to you?

When the 680 and 670 first came out people were condemning Nvidia for not releasing them with 4GB of RAM. In a way this vindicates Nvidia's position in that 4GB is just not necessary.

I love performance tests of this variety that you do here, it's one of the main reasons [H] has been my first stop when looking for hardware reviews for over a decade now but there is something that has left me scratching my head, ever so slightly after reading this one. It obviously seems to show that in most cases the extra vram is not a factor in SLI for surround displays and that's needless to say, great news for budget minded enthusiasts such as I. However in your earlier review of the GTX 660ti SLI setup in surround, you state that you should get the 3gb versions for the best gameplay experience.

So is that simply due to the different architecture of the cards, mem. buss etc? Or is this perhaps because it was before this latest test and you just assumed like everyone else that more then 2gb vram was always better for triple screen resolutions these days? Just looking for a bit more insight if possible as it's that time of the year when I do a little pc upgrading and I'm always looking to get the best performance per dollar I can afford and this year it's time for video card upgrades.

Here's my current system specs:

i5 2500k @ 4.4ghz
Gigabyte P67A-UD4-B3
8gb G-skill X-series 1600mhz
EVGA GTX460 1gb SC EE x2 SLI
Antec CP-850
OCZ Vertex 3 SSD 90gb (OS)
WD Raptor HDD 150gb (games)
WD Black HDD 750gb (storage)
Win 7 64 Pro
Antec P182SE
Viewsonic VX2439WM x 3

I currently run a surround setup at a 6010x1080 resolution and yes, those cards work well for me. Reason being the main games I play in surround are rFactor and IL-2 1946, with the occasional iRacing form time to time. All old games with old graphics demands so I've been sitting pretty and using high or max in game graphics settings. Still though I would like to get some more horsepower in the graphics dept. mainly for the rFactor 2 beta & Rise of Flight. Both of which I really enjoy but need to play on a single screen for it to be truly enjoyable with the current setup. I don't play FPS's or RPG's the pc, I'm a simmer but I do like RTS's too (mostly Supreme Commander FA and the Company of Heros games). I was planning on going to a 3gb 660ti SLI setup as the upgrade initially but now I'm wondering if the 2gb versions would do me just fine or if I really should try to jump up to a pair of 2gb 670's. I know that of course the 670's will give me more horsepower but I'm not convinced I really need it for my gaming needs.

Then I have one last question and that's I also use Power Director 10 for video editing and love the Cuda acceleration I get to take advantage of with it. I think I saw someone say somewhere that the Fermi cards were far better in those apps then Kepler. Any truth to that? Should it be a consideration for me?

Thanks in advance for any and all advice!

I have two of the galaxy 4gb cards in my machine and couldn't be happier, although I'm kinda regretting having bought them, since I pretty much only game on my 120hz monitor now. Still, it'll pay off in the long run when I eventually sell my 1440p and go 3d surround. I'm happy with the cards, but if I had to buy new right now, I would go with a pair of 7970s. 3gb and a bigger memory bus, plus the recent drivers have contributed leaps and strides towards performance.

Looks awesome if you want to save a little bit instead of 680s, can out it towards a better cpu

If these cards were in a case, how hot would they get in SLI?

having a 680 SLi review ?

Test the 670 mini in SLI, or with one mini as the bottom card for airflow.