EVGA GTX 660 Ti Superclocked SLI Scaling

Let me start this article off with an apology – I was unable to complete overclocked runs of the cards in SLI, thus, I’m sorry. One of the cards needed to make its way back to NVIDIA to look at an unexpected heat-related issue (only affecting that one card as far as we can tell) and that issue, combined with very little time to bench them, ended up being an insurmountable obstacle. Things were so rushed, I didn’t even remember to take a photo of the two cards installed together. Anyway, that’s why all of the SLI results you will see here are completed at stock clocks.

So, with that said, let’s start the show. This should be pretty short, sweet and to the point, just presenting the data for you to see. The card itself you already know from our review of the EVGA GTX 660 Ti Superclocked; this is just two of those together in SLI.

EVGA GTX 660Ti Superclocked - SLI
EVGA GTX 660Ti Superclocked – SLI

As you can see, they make a heck of a pair for 3DMark 11, which is right where we’ll start – Synthetic Benchmarks.

Synthetic Benchmarks

When going through the benchmarks and games today, we’ll just present the data in a constant stream, then stop to check out how things scaled.

3DMark03
3DMark03
3DMark Vantage
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
3DMark 11
HWBot Heaven DX11
HWBot Heaven DX11

3DMark03 wasn’t much of a surprise, I didn’t expect that to scale all that well. Vantage was quite the surprise though. DirectX10 isn’t that old, however, remember that Vantage is a CPU-bound benchmark on newer platforms. The single-card and SLI GPU scores from Vantage results were 29713 and 48200 marks, respectively; so the actual GPU part of the bench scaled very close to where 3DMark 11 did – 162.2%.

Now, when you get to the DirectX 11 benchmarks, which are still pretty solidly GPU-bound, you start to see a good separation. Heaven was quite impressive, almost fully doubling the score.

GTX 660Ti SLI Benchmark Scaling
GTX 660 Ti SLI Benchmark Scaling

Game Tests

For our game tests, we’ll split them up into two sets of three so you don’t have to look at a massive wall of graphs.

Aliens vs. Predator DX11 Benchmark
Aliens vs. Predator DX11 Benchmark
Batman: Arkham City
Batman: Arkham City
Battlefield 3
Battlefield 3

Well then, these first three games show massive scaling, with darn near double framerates for AvP & Battlefield 3.

There, wasn’t that one sentence to break up the wall of graphs nice?

Civilization V
Civilization V
Dirt 3
Dirt 3
Metro 2033
Metro 2033

Not bad at all for these three but not as good as the first three.

As you can see in the scaling chart, the curve is pulled down quite a bit by Civilization V. If you removed Civ V, which doesn’t scale well at all, you get a much more respectable scaling average of 182.2%.

NVIDIA GTX 660Ti SLI Scaling - 1080p Games
NVIDIA GTX 660  Ti SLI Scaling – 1080p Games

Now let’s hook up a couple more monitors and see how Surround scales.

NVIDIA Surround

The GTX 660 Ti is a little bit more limited here because of memory bandwidth, but even so you can see strong scaling in pretty much everything but Metro 2033. Even with a pair of 660 Ti’s, Metro brings the system to its knees.

Still, with Metro’s pitiful scaling, you get a strong scaling average. Civ V even scales well when run at such a high resolution. Again removing the worst performer (Metro 2033), you get 179.4% scaling.

NVIDIA Surround - 5760x1080
NVIDIA Surround – 5760×1080
NVIDIA GTX 660Ti SLI Scaling - Surround @ 5760x1080
NVIDIA GTX 660Ti SLI Scaling – Surround – 5760×1080

Thus ends our exploration of the EVGA GTX 660 Ti SC times two. NVIDIA has done well with this GPU’s SLI scaling. With the rare exception, which depends on resolution, you can expect very near 180-185% scaling throughout.

At $600+ for a pair of these, if you have that much money to begin with, I think it would probably be a better decision to go with a GTX 680 (which start at $480) or HD 7970 (which start at $400). If you read our recent review of the ASUS HD 7970 DirectCU II TOP ($440 MSRP) and saw how well it performs in Eyefinity (its overclocked framerates were overall north of the pair of GTX 660Ti’s), you can see why I say that.

However, if you only have $300 and need a gaming system right now, grabbing an EVGA GTX 660 Ti SC for that much now and upgrading it later by adding a second GTX 660 Ti wouldn’t be a bad one-two punch in the fight for higher FPS.

Jeremy Vaughan (hokiealumnus)

About Jeremy Vaughan 197 Articles
I'm an editor and writer here at Overclockers.com as well as a moderator at our beloved forums. I've been around the overclocking community for several years and just love to sink my teeth into any hardware I can get my paws on!

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Avatar of ivanlabrie
ivanlabrie

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6,458 messages 0 likes

Thanks for a great while being rushed review!
I think with the current rebates 7950's can be much better all around, specially for higher resolutions where memory bandwidth is a concern.

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Avatar of PolePosition
PolePosition

Member

795 messages 30 likes

I was wondering how the 660Ti SC performed, and while I have been a big fan of Nividia cards, I might have to consider a HD 7950 when the time comes to upgrade since two 660s SLI doesn't come close to one 7950, not in performance, not in price.

I just wonder what the lifespan is with ATI/Radeon cards compared to Nividia, because it would need to last me 5 years. I also wonder which of the two run the coolest and quietest. I imagine 2 660s would be more noisy and run much hotter.

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