MSI GeForce GTX 660 Ti Power Edition 2 GB Review 36

MSI GeForce GTX 660 Ti Power Edition 2 GB Review

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Introduction

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The newest member of NVIDIA's GeForce Kepler family is also its most important. The new GeForce GTX 660 Ti launched today targets a cost-performance sweet-spot with its US $299reference price. What makes this price-point of particular importance to GPU makers is that graphics cards priced around it compete directly with premium game console bundles from the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 line, transforming ordinary desktop PCs into lean and mean gaming monstrosities. By NVIDIA's own statistics, PCs are growing as a gaming platform, and the $299 price-point is one of its prime movers.

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti is derived from the 28 nm GK104 silicon, the same chip that powers GeForce GTX 670, Kepler poster-boy GeForce GTX 680, and the flagship GeForce GTX 690. It is closer to the GeForce GTX 670 in more specifications than the GTX 680 is, down to the same chip. It has the same number of CUDA cores with 1,344, and the same set of clock speeds with 915 MHz core, 980 MHz GPU Boost, and 6.00 GHz memory. The only points of difference between the two are memory bus width with 192-bit (against 256-bit on the GTX 670), and ROP count with 24 (against 32 on the GTX 670). The memory bus is narrower by 25%, resulting in a memory bandwidth of 144 GB/s (against 192 GB/s on the GTX 670).

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti, with its starting price of $299, is also NVIDIA's most expensive performance-segment GPU to date. Its predecession includes the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, the GTX 460 1 GB, the GTX 260, and the 9800 GT – all of which had slightly lower price points. Given that AMD has two SKUs in close-quarters with this price-point, the Radeon HD 7870 and Radeon HD 7950, NVIDIA would have chosen this price-point as well. In this review, we test this notion.



MSI's GTX 660 Ti Power Edition uses the company's large dual-fan Twin Frozr cooler, which we have seen on many other cards from the company. The card is also overclocked out of the box to provide an additional performance improvement over the relatively low clocks of the NVIDIA GTX 660 Ti reference design. Price-wise, MSI is asking $330 for their card, a $30 increase over the NVIDIA reference design.

GeForce GTX 660 Ti Market Segment Analysis
 GeForce
GTX 570
Radeon
HD 6970
Radeon
HD 7850
Radeon
HD 7870
GeForce
GTX 580
GeForce
GTX 660 Ti
MSI
GTX 660 Ti
Radeon
HD 7950
GeForce
GTX 670
Radeon
HD 7970
HD 7970
GHz Ed.
GeForce
GTX 680
Shader Units4801536102412805121344134417921344204820481536
ROPs403232324824243232323232
Graphics ProcessorGF110CaymanPitcairnPitcairnGF110GK104GK104TahitiGK104TahitiTahitiGK104
Transistors3000M2640M2800M2800M3000M3500M3500M4310M3500M4310M4310M3500M
Memory Size1280 MB2048 MB2048 MB2048 MB1536 MB2048 MB2048 MB3072 MB2048 MB3072 MB3072 MB2048 MB
Memory Bus Width320 bit256 bit256 bit256 bit384 bit192 bit192 bit384 bit256 bit384 bit384 bit256 bit
Core Clock732 MHz880 MHz860 MHz1000 MHz772 MHz915 MHz+1020 MHz+800 MHz915 MHz+925 MHz1050 MHz1006 MHz+
Memory Clock950 MHz1375 MHz1200 MHz1200 MHz1002 MHz1502 MHz1502 MHz1250 MHz1502 MHz1375 MHz1500 MHz1502 MHz
Price$250$340$230$290$430$300$330$340$400$440$500$500
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Oct 16th, 2024 04:39 EDT change timezone

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