Welcome to a very exciting unboxing. This is the all-new GeForce GTX 660Ti.
And this particular one is actually pretty special. This is MSI's power
edition of the card, which features their triple overvoltage enhanced PWM
design, as well as their Twin Frozer 4
cooler, which is the, as you might be able to guess, fourth iteration of their
Twin Frozer cooler. Twin Frozer is a
funny thing because when I first heard of a Twin
Frozer cool cooler, I was like, "Oh,
they spelled it wrong." cuz it's F R O Z
R and then I was like like you know were
they paying like a consultancy firm like per character to come up with the name
for it or something and then you know I just I kind of got used to it and at
this point I just I don't care anymore because a twin frozer just basically
means it's like an awesome dual fan cooler and so I don't worry too much
about like if it's spelled correctly or
not. So I mean that's the thing about branding is you know like what's a
Kijiji? But if you get used to it long enough, then it just doesn't really
matter anymore. Um, anyway, I digress.
Let's talk about graphics cards. So, this is based on NVIDIA's GK 104 chip,
which for the first time in my memory anyway is the for the first time we're
seeing the same chip that's featured in their
high-end like flagship single GPU product, their dual GPU product now in
an X6 something product level. So, this
is a mid-range card in terms of the price point that we're going to see.
well, mid-range, like still a gamer level card, but but it's it's more of a
like a mainstreamy rather than an enthusiast class card, but it's using
the same GPU with the same technology as the 680, the 690, and the
670. It's got uh even the clock speeds
are the same. Actually, let's see. They have clock speeds on here. So the
reference cards will have the same clock speeds as a GeForce GTX 670 with the
only difference being a 192bit memory bus as compared to a 256-bit memory bus
on the GTX 670. So, you got 2 gigs of GD
GDDR5 memory due to NVIDIA's in
innovative uh memory controller that allows them to still get this nice even
2 gig number in spite of the uh the
memory bus which would normally have limited them to an either a 1.5 gig
memory configuration or a 3 gig memory configuration. You've also got a lot of
technology that gets carried over from those basically everything from those
higherend cards, including GPU boost, which dynamically adjusts the GPU clock
speeds depending on the load that's being put on the card and how much power
is being drawn from the card so that you're always getting the highest performance you can in the applications
that demand it. Uh, here got some
accessories. Sorry, I am going to keep I am going to keep going with the stuff on
the box, but I want to start getting this card open here so that uh that you
guys can check it out because I am
extremely excited about the GeForce
660Ti and particularly the power edition
from MSI due to their triple over voltage design. So, here I'll let you
guys sort of stare at the board a little bit with Slick's assistance while I talk
about some of the other technology that's being carried over from previous
edition cards. So, here's a big one. Adaptive VSYNC. So, adaptive VSYNC
basically gives you the best of both worlds. When your frame rate goes above
the refresh rate of your monitor, adaptive vsync will turn VSYNC on, which
will give you uh which will reduce the amount of tear. Well, eliminate tearing,
which is when you kind of turn around and you see half of the image was drawn
uh while you were looking over here and the other half is drawn while you're looking slightly over here. So, they
don't quite meet up in the middle or up here somewhere. And that's a big
problem. And then what's great about adaptive vsync is it turns it off as
soon as you get at or below the refresh rate of the monitor. So the benefit of
that is that when you have VSYNC on you have to be at an even um multiple of no
not a multiple divisor a factor I think it's a factor of the refresh rate of the
monitor or whatever okay that times something has to multiply to the refresh
rate. So if you're at a refresh rate of 60 for your monitor you have to run at
30 FPS as opposed to 45. So it'll knock
you down to a lower frame rate. So what it does is it turns it off to prevent
that from happening. So that's good stuff as well. Uh GPU boost. Ah yes,
amazing performance per watt as well as class leading idle power consumption
which to me is one of the most important things about it because even the most
hardcore gamer still checks Facebook and
email and doesn't necessarily game all the time. So having
a video card that doesn't kick out a ton of heat and doesn't consume a ton of
power when you're not actually playing video games is very very important to
me. Here you can have a look at the twin frozer cooler while I check my notes. So
you've got full support for NVIDIA 3D Vision Surrounding off of a single card.
You've got support for TXA. So TXA is
basically a much a much better way of
doing anti-aliasing. So NVIDIA has incorporated a variety of different
approaches to get you significantly better image quality without necessarily
the same level of performance hit that we've seen in the
past. And what TXA does is it offers a
higher level of quality of filtering than has previously been achievable. Now
not all games support it, but like any new technology, we will eventually see
it continue to move forward. FXA is of course uh high quality anti-aliasing,
not quite the same as MSAA, but with a much lower performance hit compared to a
more traditional anti-aliasing. So, if you don't know what anti-aliasing is, um
well, Google's your friend, but we're going to focus on this this card and
other aspects of it for now. So, Twin Frozer 4 cooler, lots of different
technology. So, you got your dual fans, you got your propeller blades, which
with these coatings at the end actually reduce the amount of noise they make, as
well as improve the amount of air flow that they push due to the design of the
blade. Also, they've added dust repellent technology, which gets the fan
to spin the opposite way the first and when it's first turned on to pull some
of the dust out of the fins before it reverses direction and pushes air back
through the fins. So, this keeps dust from settling on the fins and means you
won't have to clean your video card as often, if at all, using this technology.
So, twin frozer 4 cooler. Yeah. What else? What else do we have to say about
it? Ah, yes. Super pipes. So, these ones out here, the heat pipes that have to
carry the heat furthest away from the GPU out to the very edges of the cooler.
Those ones are using thicker heat pipes, whereas the ones that are right over the
GPU itself and aren't carrying heat very far are using thinner heat pipes. That
way they're using the more expensive, thicker heat pipes in the areas where
you really have to work harder to move the heat away from the GPU and spread it
out to the radiator, which covers almost the entire card. Speaking of things that
cover almost the entire card, you can see there's a unis right here instead of
putting it, you know, lots of gamers love back plates. See the uh see the
plate that's covering almost the entirety of the card, including all the
VRM as well as the uh RAM modules. And
see this fold right here? This gives the card a lot of rigidity. So, lots of
gamers love back plates because they can make the card look pretty slick and
sexy. But there's a problem with back plates and that is that as soon as you
add a little bit more height to the back of the card, you are reducing the
compatibility with multi-GPU configurations. A lot of the time you
take two cards with a back plate, you try and put them side by side and you know, try SLI or whatever other config
you want and you go, oh, all of a sudden your cards are kind of like like this
away from each other because those back plates don't leave enough space. MSI's
approach is to build in this unisync which gives a lot of the benefits of the
back plate including cooling many of the components. You can see with their
custom PCB all the components except for a couple memory modules are on the other
side of the card. Okay, so you're getting the cooling benefit. Besides,
you're getting the active cooling from the fan anyway. If anything, there should be more benefit to doing it this
way. You're also getting that extra rigidity to the card. This card has
almost no flex. So you get that same benefit that you'd get from a back plate
except that you're putting it on the front and you still maintain a very
clean look and all of that good stuff. It's just a matter of where they've put
that plate of metal. So in terms of phys
other physicality the card pretty much
what you've come to expect. I mean it's using the same GPU most of the same
technology as a 670 or 680. So, you got dual DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort out.
Again, supporting uh NVIDIA 3D Vision surround off of a single card. You've
got two SLI fig fingers, meaning you're going to have support for at least
three-way graphics card configurations, which is again very unexpected for what
would normally be more of a a mid-range gaming level graphics card. PCI Express
3.0 is fully supported by this card. Two
PCIe uh six pin power connectors. It's a
very power efficient card. In fact, I'm surprised they even need two of them to
be to be perfectly blunt. And
um which leads us to the most important
things about this card. So number one is something you can't really see that well
because there's nothing on the back of the card. And this heat spreader covers
all of the PWM for the card. You can't really see anything, but it uses a five
plus two phase power design compared to the four plus two phase power design of
a reference card. That means better stability and overclocking. and in
theory uh better better overclocks which leads us to the single
most important thing about the power edition and that is the fact that it
features triple over voltage. Triple over voltage is MSI's sort of branding
marketing speak thing for the ability to
overvolt the core, the PLL and the
memory. Now, I'm going to let that sink in for a
second. There won't be another GTX 660Ti
at launch that allows overvolting the core, which means that as long as you've
got decent cooling on this card, this will be the 660Ti that will overclock
better than any other card. Now, this is only the unboxing. I haven't tested it
yet. And I do have uh a power edition
triple over voltage card. And I have another one that I'm going to be testing
head-to-head to find out if there's an actual benefit. Do you get higher boost
clocks from using triple over voltage
versus from not using it. So, I'm very excited to check that out. But I'm
confident enough that we're going to see the results that I'm going to go ahead and say it now. You guys are going to
want to use MSI Afterburner to overclock your GTX 660Ti Power Edition with triple
over voltage. And if you want the most performance per dollar out of a 660Ti,
um, this will be the way to go. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and
first look at the 6 GTX 660Ti power
edition from MSI. And don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more
unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.
And I forgot to cover the DVI to VGA adapter, two dual Molex to six pin PCIe
power connectors, and a quick users guide. Download, of course, the latest
drivers from the NVIDIA website rather than using this disc. And um I'll thank
you for bearing with me when I forget things.