Hey folks, something that started with that old gunked up GTX 660Ti seems to have spiralled into something a little interesting… A second episode of “can we fix it?!”
SO what we have here is another nvidia card and indeed another Nvidia card based on the GK 104 GPU
Nvidia GTX 670 which a cut down GTX 680 in May of 2012 and back then it retailed for $399. I’ve talked in other videos about the process of binning a lot on this channel and the GTX 670 is simply a GTX 680 which didn’t quite make the grade.
That doesn’t mean it was a bad product though, The CUDA core count dropped down from the 680’s 1,536 to 1,344 (a reduction of 192 cores) , 128 TMUS dropped down by 16 to 112 units and we still get all 32 ROPS and a 2GB GDDR5 Memory buffer on a 256-bit bus. The card at stock boosts to just over 1Ghz and the memory has an effective speed of just over 6Ghz.
Sounds great right? I mean the GTX 680 is basically the same as a GTX 770 and the 660TI is still a decent budget performer so we should be able to see some great results with this?
In theory … Yes especially in this pre overclocked EVGA SC edtion… In reality… no. This card was actually donated to me from a youtuber called Twistedskinztech who ill link in the description and displays some really strange behaviour.
The problem is random crashes immediately when putting the GPU under load we see a temperature spike and immediate crash so something is up. Dialling back the clock speeds in MSI afterburner allows us to get into a game with no issues though but as we ramp the clock speeds back up we eventually can replicate the failure time and time again..
So let's get this reference style cooler off and see if we can find anything…
Stripping it back it's a little dusty but nothing untoward. What was more interesting to me was the PCB layout. I’ve mentioned that it is based on the same GK104 GPU as the 680 and the 660Ti but when you see them side by side its pretty difficult to distinguish between the two. .. This including the identically placed cooler holes which got me thinking.. The AMP! Edition cooler is a little overkill for the 660Ti but it might help reduce the temperature spikes on this 670.. Could it be just the blower style cooler is at the end of its life?
Well out with the 660Ti and stripping it back now and everything connected up we have this strangely familiar little Hybrid.
But will it stop the card blacking out under load? Will I actually be able to benchmark anything .. tune in to find out!
Big thanks to TwsitedSkinzTech for sending this Zombified GTX 670 over for me to play with - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnPYtcJ2wtmYCP4nFTKRGpA
The PC we are running the game on consists of the following:
CPU: Intel Core i5 4590 @ 3.7Ghz
Motherboard: Gigabyte B85M-DS3H
Ram: 8GB DDR3
PSU: 500W EVGA 80+ White
Case: Corsair 88R
Music by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100289
Artist: http://incompetech.com/
** As a note my explaination of why I set an aggressive fan curve was not really explained too well... Basically it was trying to load draw as much power into the fans from idle so we don't experience additional power draw when booting up a game... whether it worked or no is another matter!
