The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Review: GK106 Fills Out The Kepler Family
by Ryan Smith on September 13, 2012 9:00 AM ESTJust What Is NVIDIA’s Competition & The Test
Every now and then it’s productive to dissect NVIDIA’s press presentation to get an idea of what NVIDIA is thinking. NVIDIA’s marketing machine is generally laser-focused, but even so it’s not unusual for them to have their eye on more than one thing at a time.
In this case, ostensibly NVIDIA’s competition for the GTX 660 is the Radeon HD 7800 series. But if we actually dig through NVIDIA’s press deck we see that they only spend a single page comparing the GTX 660 to a 7800 series card (and it’s a 7850 at that). Meanwhile they spend 4 pages comparing the GTX 660 to prior generation NVIDIA products like the GTX 460 and/or the 9800GT.
The most immediate conclusion is that while NVIDIA is of course worried about stiff competition from AMD, they’re even more worried about competition from themselves right now. The entire computer industry has been facing declining revenues in the face of drawn out upgrade cycles due to older hardware remaining “good enough” for longer period of times, and NVIDIA is not immune from that. To even be in competition with AMD, NVIDIA needs to convince its core gaming user base to upgrade in the first place, which it seems is no easy task.
NVIDIA has spent a lot of time in the past couple of years worrying about the 8800GT/9800GT in particular. “The only card that matters” was a massive hit for the company straight up through 2010, which has made it difficult to get users to upgrade even 4 years later. As a result what was once a 2 year upgrade cycle has slowly stretched out to become a 4 year upgrade cycle, which means NVIDIA only gets to sell half as many cards in that timeframe. Which leads us back to NVIDIA’s press presentation: even though the GTX 460/560 has long since supplanted the 9800GT’s install base, NVIDIA is still in competition with themselves 4 years later, trying to drive their single greatest DX10 card into the sunset.
The Test
The official launch drivers for the GTX 660 are 306.23, which are the latest iteration of NVIDIA’s R304 branch of drivers. Besides adding support for the GTX 660, these drivers are performance-identical to earlier R304 drivers in our tests.
Also, we'd like to give a quick thank you to Antec, who rushed out a replacement True Power Quattro 1200 PSU on very short notice after the fan went bad on our existing unit. Thanks guys!
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.2.3.1022 |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Monitor: | Samsung 305T |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 6870 AMD Radeon HD 7850 AMD Radeon HD 7870 AMD Radeon HD 7950 NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 304.79 Beta NVIDIA ForceWare 305.37 NVIDIA ForceWare 306.23 Beta AMD Catalyst 12.8 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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Jumangi - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
LOL way to try and spin AMD fanboy. The 660 is the equal of a 7870. It beats it in several tests and loses by a little in others. The $229 price is correct.Go qq somewhere else AMD dude.
Jamahl - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
Actually if you read anywhere else you'll find that the 7870 wins by 5-10% in the vast majority of cases.Samus - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
I'll take Anandtech reviews over any other reviews. This site has a 15 year reputation for truth.Jamahl - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
You do that. Most other people would take the average of all the reviews, and when they did that they'd realise that once again Anandtech is an outlier for Nvidia.rarson - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
Anandtech lost that reputation years ago when everything started sounding pro-Intel/Nvidia/Apple.RussianSensation - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
Raghu78 is actually right."Overall the new ASUS GeForce GTX 660 DirectCU II seems to compete well with a price comparative factory overclocked Radeon HD 7870. While the gameplay experience is mostly the same between the two video cards, for the most part the factory overclocked Radeon HD 7870 seems to take the performance lead. If you look back at every game, the overclocked Radeon HD 7870 is on top in terms of raw performance,"
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/09/13/asus_gef...
Given that NV is 7 months late, all they did here was just barely match the price/performance of a 7 months old part. Hard to get excited about that when it's mid-September 2012 and HD8000 series isn't far off now.
HisDivineOrder - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
Geforce 660 MSRP is $230. Radeon 7870 MSRP is $250. And if you're saying that the Geforce launch is unimpressive then you're probably ignoring the fact that AMD ignored price drops for the 78xx series cards for many, many months and only just when the info about the 660 and 660 Ti began to show up did they start aggressively lowering their pricing.So... what's impressive about nVidia's parts is that they brought competition which drove AMD to lower pricing so much you could today say there's nothing impressive about nVidia's pricing.
And that's what's impressive about it. You should be thanking nVidia for finally showing up to the competition.
Also, saying the "HD8000 series isn't far off now" is disingenuous if that line follows the same model as the 7000 series and staggers the launch so the low end comes midway through or at the end of 1Q 2013. We're not talking about the high end. We're talking about the mainstream variants.
And, if you truly believe your rhetoric, then AMD will price those parts as high or higher than the 78xx series showed up with in order to milk the market while nVidia's not able to keep up. So those cards again won't matter much since they won't be anywhere near the same price as these mid-$200 cards.
We don't even know if AMD won't milk this gen a while longer than they did prior generations because their strategy seems very different than the one they've used for quite a while. And with nVidia coming so late in this gen, AMD might see advantage in riding it out with parity and lower prices (while building up inventory of HD8k) to clean out their old stock.
Then one day after first quarter 2013, WHAM! HD8000 arrives in force. nVidia employees throughout the world look up from typing biased forum posts in every forum you visit and almost weep as cards in every bracket suddenly appear in the marketplace, but then a ray of hope shines through the darkness...
AMD priced everything high again. Angels sing and as Chuck Norris descends upon the clouds of awesomeness and badassness... GK110 arrives in his wake.
Ahhhh... I like this guessing game about what will happen with next gen thing.
raghu78 - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
buzz off . the majority of the reviews on the web show the HD 7870 to be faster.http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/grafikkarten/20...
http://ht4u.net/reviews/2012/nvidia_geforce_gtx_66...
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/876-21/recapitulat...
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GT...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-66...
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/09/13/asus_gef...
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/...
Margalus - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
I selected one random choice from your links, techpowerup. Guess what, the page you linked shows the 660 has higher performance per dollar than the 7870 at all resolutions except 2560x1600Galidou - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Fun stuff, he said the ''majority'' and you look at only one of the links he sends. Replying the way you did is a little disrespectful. Next time just write: ''too long didn't read, this card ownz''.