You must see what it looks like having two of them together though. Don't crossfire before but with the 5870 and loved it but these asus cards are huge
Games and GPUs are all about the eyecandy and pushing high frames, Nvidia works with a lot of devs to get more eyecandy into games, this and this alone means I will buy an Nvidia product predominately as their efforts go back into what I am interested in. Power consumption between the two is not different enough to care. If you are thinking of SLIing I'd be considering just buying a Titan, water cooling it and clocking the crap out of it.
Well I must say I'm impressed. I spent some time mildly overclocking the card last night without touching the voltage and it is a few FPS faster than my 670 F.T.W was in Far Cry 3, Crysis 2 and Metro. The load power consumption is a touch higher admittedly, but I got the card for a lot less than I'd have spent on a second hand 670, and it's super quiet - so I am happy.
I know I'm surprised how quiet my GTX670 always is.. even after a few hours on BF3 it never spools up about ~40%.. when manually set to full blast, the fan is silly loud, but even on auto settings its quieter than my case fans at 12V. Really impressed by the stock coolers on this generation of high end Nvidia cards.
Nvidia definitely nailed the heat/cooling solutions on the 6 series cards. It's a shame AMD weren't able to to the same, they have had to rely on their partners to do the job for them. I must say though this HIS IceQ cooler, whilst almost amusingly large and monstrously ugly, is silent under load and doesn't dump heat back into my case like most aftermarket coolers. It's the main reason I jumped at it.
I had an IceQ cooler back in the 3850 days, was the same deal the... HUUUGE, blue but did the job very well.
It's quieter than the stock 680 cooler I had on the 670 F.T.W. and much quieter than the Twin Frozr III I had on the 560Ti 448. The only quieter cards I've owned have worn waterblocks Docodine, why the 8600GTS man?
Just received a HIS HD4850 with an IceQ Cooler on it, for the sprog's PC. It's replacing a knackered 9600GT with the same (albeit aftermarket) cooler.
What amazes me is that AMD haven't commissioned HIS to design the stock coolers for their high end cards. They have always made the best blowers.
Just a quick update, my overclock nets me an additional 13fps on my average and 5fps on my minimum frame rate in Crysis 3, all settings on Very High, FXAA, 1080p. Not going to challenge the multi card users, but I'm well chuffed. Minimum frame rate is 33fps which will do me since I'm no Gunsmith
I have owned both a 670 and a 7950. The 7950 i got with 5 games etc etc and i paid £203. The cooler started to piss me off a bit with the noise (XFX DD) but i was livable. I see a KFA2 GTX670 on overclcokers clearence for £119.99 and obviously HAD to buy . I couldn't not. But after testing both cards i come to the conclusion that the 7950 was better ... Yeah sure you can flash benchmarks at me till the cows come home but realistically i only want it to play the games i play. And the 7950 breezed through it all. The 670 was HOT i mean hitting near 90oC under full load and the card wasnt that quiet. In 3d mark 11 was getting 8.5k with the 670 given that it was pre-overclocked and hit about 1200 on the core during stress. Overclocking the 7950 to 1000mhz and a little tweek on the memory to 1300 i was hitting 8.9k. Once i had set a fan profile things are now much quieter and about 15oC cooler than the 670. Sure it might of been a minger which that was why it was on clearence , who knows. My point being that if a 7950 can out do a 670 then for the money a 7970 goes for vs a 680 ... no contest mate. And i say 'hullaballo' to all the AMD haters who think green camp is just better all the time ... its not! Im no fan boi, i just want what i want and i dont want to pay too much for it. Sold the 670 for £250 on ebay. Lifes a peach .
Is that the same 670 that you bought as a B grade clearance, and kept throwing up errors? The same one you openly admitted you 'wouldn't be comfortable selling on the marketplace? And now you are here boasting about how you made £270 selling it on to some poor sod who has spent a big chunk of change on a faulty card? People can draw their own conclusions from this, but I think its pretty clear: Marketplace buyers: Avoid.
Well said and have to agree with you there. If I had the money and really needed the upgrade I would go with a 670 most likely. I am waiting on FlasH getting back to me about hardware for the review site he is setting up. So maybe reviewing some cards soon
I had errors because i was trying to overclock it too much. Simple as. There was nothing wrong with the card at all. Maybe some new TIM would of helped with the temps. The buyer is very happy with card and was informed of exactly where it come from. Full refund was offered if they wanted to return it to me. Nothing dodgy about that. Did not want to put it on here and gain a bad name for myself if it was a bit dicky. Simple as. And you say you wouldnt of bought it from overclockers if you see it going for that money ...?? Really? Yeah was ok to make a few quid on it if i spotted the bargin. Why not. Thats going to fund better gear for my LAN rig. Think it was an unfair comment mate.
i had to sell my 7970s HIS's cooler is kinda huge, and i'm sure AMD could design a proper cooler if they wanted... same idea as with their CPUs. the stock cooler sucks, but it's compact and 'just werks' even though it's kinda loud and doesn't do much for overclocking
I think thats a fair point as long as the cards origin etc was listed and fully described in the description. Parge... Perhaps shouldnt have been so hasty to shoot him down I must admit.
