NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 660 Ti will be a hit, of that I am sure. The card delivers excellent performance levels at reasonable power consumption which enables board partners to create low-noise custom designs. The new GTX 660 Ti is almost twice as fast as the last-generation GTX 560 Ti, but comes at a $50 higher introductory cost.
The ASUS GTX 660 Ti uses the same DirectCU cooler which we've come to love on their GTX 670. The PCB design has also been completely revamped. The card, thanks to the overclock out of the box, achieves a 5% performance improvement over the reference design. This makes the card just 8% slower than GTX 670, and 5% faster than AMD's HD 7950, which is more expensive. In our MSI GTX 660 Ti review today, we noticed that MSI's card delivers higher performance levels at lower clocks than any other card, both at stock and overclocked. The ASUS GTX 660 Ti DC II does not show such improvements which is why I deducted a bit from the score.
ASUS has done the right thing and kept the cooling design exactly the same as on the GTX 670 which reached a perfect 10 score in TPU review - low noise was a big contributor to that win. The GTX 660 Ti DC II emits the same ultra-low noise levels in both idle and load. I've been using the GTX 670 DC II in my rig for a while now and I cannot hear the graphics card fan, no matter what games I play. While overclocking does provide a significant performance boost, reaching GTX 670 levels, we have seen better overclocking potential from other cards today, but the difference is relatively small.
Overall, the card is an excellent implementation of a custom GTX 660 Ti design, and its price of $330 is the same as all other GTX 660 Ti cards we reviewed today. At that price the card easily beats AMD's HD 7950 in all important criteria: performance, power, noise, heat, performance per Dollar, and performance per Watt. A lower price, around the $300 mark, would put more pressure on AMD though, and would make the card more interesting for the group of gamers shopping in the $250-$300 range.