MSI GTX 670 Power Edition OC Review

MSI has been making their competition a bit worried as of late. With a combination of excellent performance, advanced features, the highly regarded Twin Frozr heatsinks and rock bottom pricing, customers have been flocking to the MSI banner. The GTX 670 Power Edition OC is one of their many cards that have been making their way into the hands of enthusiasts and gamers alike. Its focus is primarily upon delivering an affordable custom-designed card to end users that don’t have the money for a GTX 680 but still want a high performance gaming experience.


As with many other overclocked GTX 670 cards, the Power Edition OC’s performance benefits come from a higher base clock, an increased Power Limit in the BIOS and a boost clock that’s been given a bump of just over 10%. Unfortunately, once again, the GDDR5 clocks have remained at their default levels but they can still be easily overclocked with MSI’s AfterBurner. Supposedly, memory overclocks have been curtailed by many of NVIDIA’s board partners in an effort to decrease binning time and increase GDDR5 yields.

After our experiences in previous reviews, an “Average Clock” row has been added to the chart above, which essentially shows the typical core speed achieved throughout our testing suite. Luckily, the MSI GTX 670 Power Edition OC didn’t exhibit any odd characteristics in this area as its in-game speeds typically hit a certain level and stayed there without fluctuating much. With that being said, the OC’s clock speeds will likely put its performance at a point somewhere between ASUS’ TOP edition and Gigabyte’s own WindForce OC.

Currently, the GTX 670 Power Edition OC is going for $409 with a $25 mail in rebate, making it only $384. On top of that, for a limited time all NVIDIA GTX 600-series cards come with a free download code for Borderlands 2, which happens to be a $60 value provided you haven’t already purchased it. This should make MSI’s card one of the least expensive GTX 670s currently on the market, even without the game’s inclusion. Against AMD’s new HD 7950 Boost Edition, the price / performance ratio does fall by the wayside a bit but the PE’s other features and higher clock speeds add a value of their own to this equation.

MSI’s 3 year warranty (no registration required) is par for the course in this industry but with localized RMA facilities in Canada and the United States, the actual return experience should be relatively smooth.