Palit Geforce GTX 670 2GB JetStream Review

The 670 ranges are out, and today we'll look at Palit's JetStream version of the GTX 670. We were impressed with the GTX 680 JetStream earlier, and are happy to say that the GTX 670 performs just as good, as long as you stick to the 1920x1080 resolution.


This is a factory overclocked, custom cooled, custom designed PCB GeForce GTX 670 and in a way, you could call it a diluted version of the 680GTX. NVIDIA disabled some of the shader processors and designed it to be more cost effective with its smaller PCB.

No fear however, the card still packs a muscle of performance even though the GK104 GPU based graphics card has one SM/SMX cluster disabled. If you're not sure what that means, think of it this way: The card has less CUDA cores to work with and that means less resources. Remember though, it does not require you to fork out a premium price.

One thing Palit has managed to do, thanks to its custom cooled design, was overclocking the base speed from 915M MHz to just over 1000 MHz, which isn't far off from big brother GTX 680. To give the cards framebuffer to work with, they've decked the card out with 2048 GDDR5 with a clock speed of 6106 MHz. In a sense you have a card that's almost close to the 680GTX. Oh, and it wont draw too much power either. It only has a slight increased TDP at roughly 180 Watts. 



The card comes with the usual cables, drivers, and on its I/O panel, you have 1 HDMI/DisplayPort and Dual DVI connectors. Be careful here though, only 1 of the DVI ports is meant for Dual Link cables. Should you decide to go beyond 1920 x 1080, you'll have to plug into the correct slot. Also it requires two-6 pin power cables. For anyone interested in going Dual-SLI, do know that they take up almost two PCI-slots and you'll need an XL mainboard for that to happen.


The included ThunderMaster OC utility lets you tweak and monitor the GTX670. This includes clock/voltage meters, the ability to adjust and fine tune settings, and load/save profiles. In terms of temperature, the JetStream design appears to do a pretty good job at keeping it down. One thing to note though, the fans can get pretty noisy when the card is hard at work. This seems to only happen when we jack the resolution up to 2560 x 1440 on ultra settings for Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. If not, the temperature ranges round 50 - 60 degrees which isn't too bad.

In terms of frames per second, playing at maximum settings on Spec Ops The Line came up with an average 50 - 60FPS. Only during intense fire fights do we see that dip down to 40. One thing to take note, the card begins to chug under-pressure when the resolution was jacked up to 2560 x 1440. We blame Mikey for insisting on using a 27" inch monitor. If you're using a 24" inch only, this card would have no problems.

In all the Palit GTX 670 2GB JetStream, handles itself well has a mid-tier card that's almost close to performing at high-end capabilities. Priced at just under $600, this is the card to get if you're intending to go SLI with a set of cards that are almost close to the GTX680, without the power guzzling consumption.