The GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review, Feat. EVGA, Zotac, and Gigabyte
by Ryan Smith on August 16, 2012 9:00 AM ESTFinal Words
Bringing the review to a close, it should come as no surprise that the launch of the GTX 660 Ti has ended up being a lot like the launches before it. Yet at the same time it’s not truly identical, as there’s a lot going on that makes it nothing like the launches before it.
Distilled to its essence, the GTX 660 Ti is yet another fine addition to the GTX 600 series thanks to the GK104 GPU. Compared to the GTX 670 it’s a bit slower, a lot cheaper, and still brutally efficient. For buyers who have wanted to pick up a Kepler card but have found the high-end GTX 670 and GTX 680 out of their price range, at $300 the GTX 660 Ti is at a much more approachable point on the price-performance curve, offering about 88% of the GTX 670’s performance for 75% of the price. Given the price of Kepler cards so far this is definitely a better deal, though it’s still by no means cheap. So in that respect the launch of the GTX 660 Ti is quite a lot like the launches before it.
What’s different about this launch compared to the launches before it is that AMD was finally prepared; this isn’t going to be another NVIDIA blow-out. While the GTX 680 marginalized the Radeon HD 7970 virtually overnight, and then the GTX 670 did the same thing to the Radeon HD 7950, the same will not be happening to AMD with the GTX 660 Ti. AMD has already bracketed the GTX 660 Ti by positioning the 7870 below it and the 7950 above it, putting them in a good position to fend off NVIDIA.
As it stands, AMD’s position correctly reflects their performance; the GTX 660 Ti is a solid and relatively consistent 10-15% faster than the 7870, while the 7950 is anywhere between a bit faster to a bit slower depending on what benchmarks you favor. Of course when talking about the 7950 the “anything but equal” maxim still applies here, if not more so than with the GTX 670. The GTX 660 Ti is anywhere between 50% ahead of the 7950 and 25% behind it, and everywhere in between.
Coupled with the tight pricing between all of these cards, this makes it very hard to make any kind of meaningful recommendation here for potential buyers. Compared to the 7870 the GTX 660 Ti is a solid buy if you can spare the extra $20, though it’s not going to be a massive difference. The performance difference is going to be just enough that AMD is going to need to trim prices a bit more to secure the 7870’s position.
On the other hand due to the constant flip-flopping of the GTX 660 Ti and 7950 on our benchmarks there is no sure-fire recommendation to hand down there. If we had to pick something, on a pure performance-per-dollar basis the 7950 looks good both now and in the future; in particular we suspect it’s going to weather newer games better than the GTX 660 Ti and its relatively narrow memory bus. But the moment efficiency and power consumption start being important the GTX 660 Ti is unrivaled, and this is a position that is only going to improve in the future when 7950B cards start replacing 7950 cards. For reasons like that there are a couple of niches one card or another serves particularly well, such as overclocking with the 7950, but ultimately unless you have a specific need either card will serve you well enough.
But enough about competition, let’s talk about upgrades for a moment. As we mentioned in our discussion on pricing, performance cards are where we see the market shift from rich enthusiasts who buy cards virtually every generation to more practical buyers who only buy every couple of generations. For these groups it’s a mixed bag. The GTX 660 Ti is actually a great upgrade for the GTX 560 Ti (and similar cards) from a performance standpoint, but despite the similar name it can’t match the GTX 560 Ti’s affordability. This entire generation has seen a smaller than normal performance increase at the standard price points, and the GTX 660 Ti doesn’t change this. If you’re frugal and on Fermi, you’re probably going to want to wait for whatever comes next. On the other hand performance is finally reaching a point where it’s getting very hard to hold on to GTX 200 series cards, especially as the lack of memory on those sub-1GB products becomes more and more prominent. The GTX 660 Ti can clobber any GTX 200, and it can do so with far less power and noise.
Finally, let’s discuss the factory overclocked cards we’ve seen today. Thanks to the fact that this is a virtual launch there’s an incredible variety of cards to pick from, with all of the major partners launching multiple cards with both the reference clocks and with factory overclocks. We’ve only been able to take a look at 3 of those cards today, but so far we like what we’re seeing.
Right now the partner card most likely to turn heads is Gigabyte’s GeForce GTX 660 Ti OC. Even if you ignore the overclock for a second it’s a GTX 660 Ti with an oversized cooler, which ends up being used to great effect. Thanks to Gigabyte’s Windforce 2X cooler it’s both cool and silent, which is always a great combination. Meanwhile the factory overclock alongside the higher power target is icing on the cake, although the lack of a memory bandwidth overclock means that the cooler is more valuable than the overclock.
But if you want something quite a bit smaller and generally a bit faster still, Zotac’s GeForce GTX 660 Ti AMP is no slouch. The memory overclock really makes up for GTX 660 Ti’s memory bandwidth shortcomings, and the size means it will fit into even small cases rather well. Its only downsides are that the $329 price tag puts it solidly in 7950 territory, and that the cooler is very average, especially when held up against what Gigabyte has done.
Finally there’s EVGA’s GeForce GTX 660 Ti Superclocked. The overclock is nothing to write home about – being just enough to justify the $10 price increase – but it’s otherwise a solid card. Even for 150W cards there’s still a need for blower type coolers, and EVGA will do a good job of filling that niche with their card.
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Oxford Guy - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
What is with the 285 being included? It's not even a DX 11 card.Where is the 480? Why is the 570 included instead of the 580?
Where is the 680?
Ryan Smith - Saturday, August 18, 2012 - link
The 285 was included because I wanted to quickly throw in a GTX 285 card where applicable, since NVIDIA is promoting the GTX 660 Ti as a GTX 200 series upgrade. Basically there was no harm in including it where we could.As for the 480, it's equivalent to the 570 in performance (eerily so), so there's never a need to break it out separately.
And the 680 is in Bench. It didn't make much sense to include a card $200 more expensive which would just compress the results among the $300 cards.
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
So you're saying the 680 is way faster than the 7970 which you included in every chart, since the 7970 won't compress those $300 card results.Thanks for admitting that the 7970 is so much slower.
Pixelpusher6 - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
Thanks Ryan. Great review as always.I know one of the differentiating factors for the Radeon 7950s is the 3GB of ram but I was curious are there any current games which will max out 2GB of RAM with high resolution, AA, etc.?
I think it's interesting how similar AMDs and Nvidias GPUs are this generation. I believe Nvidia will be releasing the GTX 660 non Ti based on GK106. Leaked specs seem to be similar to this card but the texture units will be reduced to 64. I wonder how much of a performance reduction this will account for. I think it will be hard for Nvidia to get the same type of performance / $ as say GTX 460 / 560 Ti this generation because of having to have GK104 fill in more market segments.
Also I wasn't aware that Nvidia was still having trouble meeting demand with GK104 chips I thought those issues were all cleared up. I think when AMD released their 7000 series chips they should have taken advantage of being first to market and been more competitive on price to grow market share rather than increase margins. At that time someone sitting on 8800GT era hardware would be hard pressed to upgrade knowing that AMDs inflated prices would come down once Nvidia brought their GPUs to market. People who hold on to their cards for a number of years is unlikely to upgrade 6 months later to Nvidias product. If AMD cards were priced lower at this time a lot more people would have bought them, thereby beating Nvidia before they even have a card to market. I do give some credit to AMD for preparing for this launch and adjusting prices, but in my opinion this should have been done much earlier. AMD management needs to be more aggressive and catch Nvidia off guard, rather than just reacting to whatever they do. I would "preemptively" strike at the GTX 660 non Ti by lowering prices on the 7850 to $199. Instead it seems they'll follow the trend and keep it at $240-250 right up until the launch of the GTX 660 then lower it to $199.
Ryan Smith - Saturday, August 18, 2012 - link
Pixelpusher, there are no games we test that max out 2GB of VRAM out of the box. 3GB may one day prove to be advantageous, but right even at multi-monitor resolutions 2GB is doing the job (since we're seeing these cards run out of compute/render performance before they run out of RAM).Sudarshan_SMD - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
Where are naked images of the card?CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
You don't undress somebody you don't love.dalearyous - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
it seems the biggest disappointment i see in comments is the price point.but if this card comes bundled with borderlands 2, and you were already planning on buying borderlands 2 then this puts the card at $240, worth it IMO.
rarson - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
but it's the middle of freaking August. While Tahiti was unfortunately clocked a bit lower than it probably should have been, and AMD took a bit too long to bring out the GE edition cards, Nvidia is now practically 8 months behind AMD, having only just released a $300 card. (In the 8 months that have gone by since the release of the 7950, its price has dropped from $450 to $320, effectively making it a competitor to the 660 Ti. AMD is able to compete on price with a better-performing card by virtue of the fact that it simply took Nvidia too damn long to get their product to market.) By the time the bottom end appears, AMD will be ready for Canary Islands.It's bad enough that Kepler (and Fermi, for that matter) was so late and so not available for several months, but it's taking forever to simply roll out the lower-tier products (and yes, I know 28nm wafers have been in short supply, but that's partially due to Nvidia's crappy Kepler yields... AMD have not had such supply problems). Can you imagine what would have happened if Nvidia actually tried to release GK110 as a consumer card? We'd have NOTHING. Hot, unmanufacturable nothing.
Nvidia needs to get their shit together. At the rate they're going, they'll have to skip an entire generation just to get back on track. I liked the 680 because it was a good performer, but that doesn't do consumers any good when it's 4 months late to the party and almost completely unavailable. Perhaps by the end of the year, 28nm will have matured enough and Nvidia will be able to design something that yields decently while still offering the competitiveness that the 680 brought us, because what I'd really like to see is both companies releasing good cards at the same time. Thanks to Fermi and Kepler, that hasn't happened for a while now. Us consumers benefit from healthy competition and Nvidia has been screwing that up for everyone. Get it together, Nvidia!
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
So as any wacko fanboy does, you fault nVidia for releasing a card later that drives the very top end tier amd cards down from the 579+ shipping I paid to $170 less plus 3 free games.Yeah buddy, it's all nVidia's fault, and they need to get their act together, and if they do in fact get their act together, you can buy the very top amd card for $150, because that's likely all it will be worth.
Good to know it's all nVidia's fault. AMD from $579+plus ship to $409 and 3 free games and nVidia sucks for not having it's act together.
The FDA as well as the EPA should ban the koolaid you're drinking.