FRONTPAGE EVGA GTX 660 Ti Superclocked Video Card Review

NVIDIA is rounding out their Kepler lineup today, releasing their mid-range GTX 660 Ti. We're taking our first look at it courtesy EVGA's GTX 660 Ti SC (Superclocked) card.

When you're done with this review, be sure to head over and check out our other launch-day review of MSI's GTX 660 Ti Power Edition.

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Great review, as always, Hokie.

With that said, $300 is hardly a mid-range card price anymore, I was hoping (for their sake) it would fall in at about $225 max $250, with consistent rebate sales hitting around the low $200s. That would jump off the shelves.

Unfortunately the market has dictated mid-range is at this price point now. I agree though, $250 would be much nicer. After they've been out a little while, I'd expect some discount / rebate programs to creep up. Obviously not while they're new, but down the road they'll probably come in a little cheaper.

What are Nvidia doing? its a GTX 670 GPU and pretty much the same performance as the GTX 670, still more expensive than the Radeon 7870, its actually around the same price as a Radeon 7950 (UK)

They still have nothing in the £200 mark, instead its a GTX 670 with a 192 Bit memory bus costing £250 / £260 (7950 money)

Now we have 3 cards from Nvidia, GTX 680 / GTX 670 / GTX 660TI, all with in 20% of eachother and priced accordingly.

It doesn't make any sense.

They are pretty close to each other, especially overclocked lower-tier to stock higher-tier. As you say, they're priced accordingly though, so they seem to be where they should be. The 7950 costs approximately $50 more here in the US, averaging ~$350, so it's where it should be too.

Competition might drive all of them down, and hopefully soon...but pricing is surprisingly perfectly controlled by the market right now... HD 7870 slightly < GTX 660 Ti, which is slightly < HD 7950, which is slightly < GTX 670.

While 1080p FPS might be similar to the GTX 670, there is a solid difference when considering multi-monitor gaming. The reduced memory bus shows its limitations pretty strongly in that scenario.

So this was the white box you've been teasing us with!!

Nice review hokie! Now the only one left to reveal his white box is Bobn!

I was really hoping this card would have a decent price so I could afford to drop my SLi (and remove OCP, plus add a voltmod to get everything these cards might have) but I just can't afford to spend EUR 330 on this when my 470s still beat them. My overclocked 470s can beat a 670, so, yeah... waiting for 700 series for me.

Bobnova's white box was for Funkykit, not us: Gigabyte GTX 660Ti OC Version.

Nice review Hokie!

I think Il'l just hold on to my GTX570s in SLI until the next gen drop. Maybe I'll overclock them now though.

hokiealumnus said:

Bobnova's white box was for Funkykit, not us: Gigabyte GTX 660Ti OC Version.

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Thanks hokie! I overslept this morning.

That is indeed my white box

Hell of a card.
Lose 64bits of memory bandwidth and a few percent performance to save $100? Hell yes.

hokiealumnus said:

They are pretty close to each other, especially overclocked lower-tier to stock higher-tier. As you say, they're priced accordingly though, so they seem to be where they should be. The 7950 costs approximately $50 more here in the US, averaging ~$350, so it's where it should be too.

Competition might drive all of them down, and hopefully soon...but pricing is surprisingly perfectly controlled by the market right now... HD 7870 slightly < GTX 660 Ti, which is slightly < HD 7950, which is slightly < GTX 670.

While 1080p FPS might be similar to the GTX 670, there is a solid difference when considering multi-monitor gaming. The reduced memory bus shows its limitations pretty strongly in that scenario.

Click to expand...

Yes they are priced acordingly

Its all it takes really, 12.6 drivers,- a refrance 7970 = GTX 680, 7950 ~ GTX 670, GTX 660Ti = 7870 + or ~ 7950.

There are wider performance gaps and price gaps between AMD cards, going from 7970 to 7950 is a 20% hit, from a 7950 to a 7870 is another 20% hit and the prices reflect that.

What i want is to max every game at 60+ FPS @ 1920 x 1080P including BF3 and have some good overclocking fun. thats exactly what i have in the 7870 and priced well for that, while the 7950 is a significantly higher performing card that is also priced acordingly.

As for multimonitor it seems even the 2GB GTX 670 / 680 also struggles more than the 3GB 7950 / 7970 at such high res, you have to pay a premium for the 4GB vertions,

In a strange sort of way none of the normal Nvidia line seem to fit in anywhere.

it looks a lot like Nvidia had the 7870 in there sights and the way they chose to beat it was by sticking 192Bit memory on a GTX 670, so they ended up with a memory throttled GTX 670 where the memory already wasn't great.

Would it not have been better to have a 256Bit memory bus on it with less shaders?

Just to be honest, not having a dig. Had i not already had the 7870 i would have gone for it over this anyway, and i had considered waiting to see the 660TI.

I like the fact that it has a 670 Chip on it, i like it performance. at stock it is faster than my card.

But i don't like the price, for that money (UK i know) the 7950 is by a good amount the better card.

Last but not least, i don't like the idea of a 192Bit memory bus, my emagination in that (right or wrong) is texture fill throtling ecte.... Its off putting.

The 660TI is priced well, i think this will bring AMD's prices down, but that will leave Nvidia in a situation where there top end card GTX 680 vs 7970 is so much more expensive at the same performance they will have to drag there whole line down before they made much money on the mid level cards (which is the main R&D)

AMD have already had there R&D from the 78## series cards with a nice small, cheape DIE size, the 8### series is out next year again already.

hokiealumnus said:

They are pretty close to each other, especially overclocked lower-tier to stock higher-tier. As you say, they're priced accordingly though, so they seem to be where they should be. The 7950 costs approximately $50 more here in the US, averaging ~$350, so it's where it should be too.

Competition might drive all of them down, and hopefully soon...but pricing is surprisingly perfectly controlled by the market right now... HD 7870 slightly < GTX 660 Ti, which is slightly < HD 7950, which is slightly < GTX 670.

While 1080p FPS might be similar to the GTX 670, there is a solid difference when considering multi-monitor gaming. The reduced memory bus shows its limitations pretty strongly in that scenario.

Click to expand...

Yep I do completely agree with you on the pricing scheme. It does pretty much work perfectly for the performance/price levels of each of the parts, I just wish (and know that in the future) the prices were lower for a more mainstream audience. As most people right now are still trying to find that nice $200 card and nothing new has really fit into that spot and leaves people with the 6950, 560ti, or a used high-end card.

They're finally out! Great job again Jeremy. Its funny, the OCF tweet of the article beat nVidia's announcement of the card by over an hour!

Thanks!

NDA lifted at 9:00am, and you can bet your bottom dollar we'll have our articles under NDA out the second they're allowed to come out.

Heh, my 670M thats in the mail looks like a downclocked 660 ti. :/

Be happy, that's closer to the desktop card than most mobile cards are these days
A tremendous amount of power for a laptop.

Now to play the 660ti or 670 decision game. Nice review. Decisions....decisions

Someone @ XS asked about Surround, so while I had a few minutes this afternoon I ran some comparisons to see at what settings you could actually play on one GTX 660 Ti. Turns out you've got to dump a good bit of eye candy, but it can get to very well playable framerates at 5760 x 1080.

Results:



It was very surprising that the detail level made zero difference at all in the middle two runs. For your perusal, screenshots at all four settings in the order they appear above. Warning - these are full size 5760x1080 shots, typically between 600 and 800 kb.

BatmanAC -8x MSAA - MVSS & HBAO: On, Tess: High, Detail: Extreme
BatmanAC -2x MSAA - MVSS & HBAO: On, Tess: Normal, Detail: Extreme
BatmanAC -2x MSAA - MVSS & HBAO: On, Tess: Normal, Detail: Very High
BatmanAC -2x MSAA - MVSS & HBAO: Off, Tess: Off, Detail: High

@Bobn. So that was your white box too! It is indeed perfect to torture forum users

On the other hand, you said something about being able to mod this to a 670 with the extra bandwidth and what not for little money and SMD components, is this a doable mod? Just something that popped out of my head.

Not without serious skills and equipment.
TJuan and I might be able to manage it, but it'd be a pain. Not really worthwhile, but doable in theory I think.

How does a GTX 480 compare to this thing? Would it be worth the upgrade?