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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MySchizoBuddy - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
If i'm a new buyer buying the older 560 at a reduced cost both be a better buy correct?Fiercé - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
While I may be in the minority, I actually check the "The Test" page of every GPU review in order to see which driver version is being used to test the hardware, as well as to get a quick mental list of 2 or 3 GPUs to watch out for in the FPS comparisons.Due to this I've noticed for this GPU review many cards are listed that don't appear anywhere in the benchmarks:
-AMD Radeon HD 6970
-AMD Radeon HD 7950B (explicitly stated over a non-B)
-AMD Radeon HD 7970
-NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570
-NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670
(Excepting all the GTX 660 Ti that of course can't be re-tested in time for a launch review, but might be useful as a "factory overclocked options" list for a reader looking at base 660 Ti performance.)
Ryan Smith - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
Thanks for the heads up. I had copied that out of the GTX 660 Ti article and had not yet edited it. It has been fixed.Fiercé - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
Cheers.Jamahl - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
That has the 660 faster than the 7870. Most reputable sites have the card squarely in-between the Pitcairns.Rick83 - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
It appears to me, that we should be glad, that the jump in performance is that low, as finally it seems the power wars of the last generation, when cards were dumping 200 Watts and more into your case, even when they were just higher mid-end cards, are over.Now of course that means we get slightly less of a performance boost, but at least power consumption of this card is below the level of a GTX260. That is important, as the 560Ti was relatively quite power hungry, especially once the wick on them was turned up a bit, which was being done quite liberally.
While the Performance/Dollar metric isn't that great, the performance/(dollar*power) is probably much better than last gen.
n9ntje - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
As everyone said it, nVidia is again late to the party. However, both (amd and nV) haven't done anything to improve the price/performance. First the $100 price range, now the 200?I'm sorry but since I bought my HD5750 almost 3 years(!) ago for 100 bucks. I dont get much more performance with a similair priced card. Now they are doing it the same to the 200 dollar cards..
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, November 29, 2012 - link
Welcome to the new socialist economy and 4 more years of it.Computer prices rise in the new socialist economy.
LOL
It's great, maybe AMD will get a bailout soon.
thorr2 - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
I saw the big image on the main page and thought it was a projector at first.cmdrdredd - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
Performance is not bad but the pricing is still too high. Start overclocking a 7870 and the 660 looks bad imo.