In late March, the first photos of Zotac's GTX 680 Extreme Edition surfaced. The high-end graphics card uses a new PCB design, alternative cooler and comes with quite the overclock. Zotac has since finished a GTX 670 version of the graphics card, which, apart from the GPU, is identical to the other model. The new creation is called GTX 670 Extreme Edition and should be of particular interest to overclockers.
Improved power design
The PCB of this new GTX 670 card is almost twice as large as Nvidia's reference model. The extra space is used for a more powerful 12+1 phase power design, high-quality components and three FPCAP capacitors that should increase stability during overclocks. The card has a 6-pin and 8-pin power connector, while a reference GTX 670 card has two 6-pin PEG connectors. The power design consists of flat DrMOS chips and AIO spools.
Overclocked out of the boxThe GPU of this graphics card features 1344 stream processors, 1/8th less than the 1536 that the GTX 680 has. This seems like a big difference but by increasing the clock frequencies Zotac has narrowed the gap between the two quite a bit. The card comes clocked at 1111 MHz, while the GPU Boost further elevates the core clock to 1202 MHz. The 2 GB of memory has also been overclocked, from 1500 MHz to 1652 MHz. At these clock frequencies, the GTX 670 even exceeds the performance of a stock GTX 680 card.
This Extreme Edition of the GTX 670 has all the features Zotac's GTX 680 model did, including the OC+ module, a double BIOS, several voltage read-out points and a decent temperature sensor. LEDs are present to indicate VRM load by the core and memory chips. The heatsink has a dual-slot design and is equipped with five nickled copper heatpipes, each with an 8 millimetre thickness. These run from the copper baseplate to a large aluminium heatsink, which is cooled by twin 92 mm fans.
Overclocked to 1403 MHz (Turbo)
Expreview obtained a sample of the card, and checked its overclockability. While it's uncertain whether Zotac sent them their best sample, the GTX 670 Extreme Edition performs exceptionally well. With aircooling and an increased voltage, Expreview was able to take the card to a clock frequency of 1300 MHz for the GPU and a GPU Boost speed of 1403 MHz. The GDDR5 memory was increased to 1850 MHz. At these frequencies, the card reached a score pf P9247 in the 3DMark 11 benchmark.
The bad news is that the card may only be available in select Asian countries. In Europe, Zotac currently only has the GTX 670 AMP! edition available. While the card runs at equal clock frequencies, it has a less extreme power design and heatsink. It's possible though that if the card proves to be successful in Asia, it will be released worldwide.
GTX 670 Extreme Edition by Zotac (Source: Expreview)
