GTX 660 Video Review MSI GeForce Twin Frozr 1080p Performance Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,612 words · ~8 min read
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welcome to another lonus tech tips video card launch video so this one is for the
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GeForce GTX 660 from NVIDIA we're going to be featuring The MSI twin frozer skew
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this is a 2 gig card and it has as you
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can clearly see their twin frozer 3
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cooler so the twin frozer 3 cooler has all of the features of a twin frozer 4
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except for one so I'm going to show you guys it's got dual fans of course it has
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a super pipe thick fat heat pipe keeps the car nice and cool it has well okay
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this is don't do this at home kids okay
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grounding first of course propeller blade fans so that that the shape as
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well as that coating on the tips makes it so that it does push more air it's
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extremely quiet you can see we're running a game right now and I'm going to get my okay I was going to have you
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move the opposite direction I'm going to stop talking and I want you to move really close to the card so you can see
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even running a game it's like inaudible you can't even
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hear the thing but it's missing the dust removal Tech where the fans counter spin
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the wrong way and uh and remove some dust from the heat sink before it starts
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so let's go into some of the details of the GPU itself so this is using a GK 106
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core okay this is just the box so there's nothing really that special here
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GK 106 core it's a Kepler based GPU so
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this is a huge improvement over last generation cards which are based on the
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fmy architecture so Kepler adds a whole bunch of stuff besides much better power
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consumption and better performance Kepler also adds support you know well
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okay the older cards support it too but innately for txaa FXAA so these are
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additional anti-aliasing modes with FXAA being fantastic for lower performance
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cards but maintaining a certain level of visual quality you've also got full
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support for adaptive vsync and being a Kepler card you also have on the tiq so
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the or rather not on the T on the 660 you've got support for up to four
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displays out so if you come back here and have a look we've got two DVI ports
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one HDMI and DisplayPort out which is going to give you three in NVIDIA
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surround plus one auxiliary display to work with now the 660 only supports
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two-way SLI so if you step up to a 660 Ti you have support for three-way SLI
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but the 660 because it's not based on the gk104 but rather based on the GK 106
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core only supports 2 asli it also has a
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192bit memory bus which is the same as the GTX 66 GTI um and what that means is
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NVIDIA is using their unique technology in order to achieve their even memory
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amount so that's the 2 gig memory amount uh versus what you normally see with a
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192-bit bus which is either 1.5 gigs or
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3 gigs so that allows us to hit kind of a sweet spot and this brings me to one
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of the major points before we get into the performance of the card too much
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that I want to make versus its last generation uh contemporary the GTX 560
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ti so these are the more price comparable cards necessarily than the
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660 Ti to the 560 TI would be so this is
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a 1 gig card you can buy 2 gig ones but the like the the normal one is a 1 gig
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card and we observed so check this out so in the 660 is getting around 100 FPS
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this is an ultra quality and the Older scrolls whatever it is Skyrim around 80
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FPS so we're going to go ahead and we're going to all Tab out of this game and we
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saw some crazy results so these results aren't done yet I still have to do some
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more testing but check this out so the 560ti to the 660 is as much as a
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doubling in performance in and uh hold
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on I'm going to have to uh I'm going to have to double check these numbers with
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the ones that I just ran okay so that's a little bit different see this is why
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I'm rerunning some of the numbers because they just plain didn't look
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right but check this out so 560ti um is beaten by more than double
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by a GTX 660 in Skyrim so what we're
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observing here is that the reason NVIDIA
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has gone with that 2 gig frame buffer is that's the sweet spot right now where 3
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gigs would potentially cost too much and not provide any additional benefit but a
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2 gig frame buffer is going to be more than enough but save you some of the
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cost on the card so that you get more Graphics power for cheaper so we've had
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people suggest actually from our 660 Ti video re review that our 560 TI results
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were nerfed in some way but that's not true at all all what you are seeing is
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the fact that we are running on Modern settings so crisis 2 is running at very
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high with the high-res textures enabled Skyrim is running at the ultra preset
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with the highres texture pack Witcher 2 is running at very high preset with
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vsync on and Metro 2033 is just a super demanding game in the first place so it
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shouldn't surprise us that much that these are games that at 1080p with high
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details are running out of room on that 1 gig frame buffer so with all that in
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mind stay tuned for
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performance all right so here I am in the home studio and I've finished all
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the benchmarking that needs to be done for this card so we've uh yeah I think
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I've already covered enough about the technology itself so here is the test
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platform and for a change I'm going to take this PowerPoint presentation I'm
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going to put a link under the video review so you guys can actually download
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it and check out the graphs at your leisure I'm going to make a habit of
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doing this in the future guys so this is all run on a core I 73 93k at 4 GHz cool
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by a course r100 you can read the rest of the specs should you so desire so
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let's go ahead and switch into play
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mode first Benchmark is Crisis 2 at
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1080p at very high settings so something you guys are going to notice again these
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560 TI results they are terrible so we
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did not see very good results with the 560 TI at all 660 Ti absolutely rocks it
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so so by about double the performance and really hangs with its bigger brother
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the 660 Ti did I say 660 Ti 660 hangs
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with its Big Brother the 660 Ti and the 670 which were both very close I think
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we get CPU limited once we hit around 95 FPS in this particular
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game the 660 competes very well against
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its direct competition the 7870 so we
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see a pretty much a neck and neck race here
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guys and our next Ben bench mark is
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Battlefield 3 so here we see the GTX 660
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performs pretty much again in line with
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the 7870 edging It Out by about you know
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4% which is outside the margin of error
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so we're going to go ahead and call it a victory but it again lags behind its
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bigger Brothers which is to be
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expected next Benchmark Skyrim Skyrim was a bit of a
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was a bit of a mess overall just due to the fact that we become very CPU limited
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once we hit around that 100 FPS Mark so it's really hard for any of these cards
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to pull away from each other however this is still a convincing victory for
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the 660 but it again loses to its bigger brother and this looked like a bit of an
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anomaly so not sure what to make of that
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but don't mind it Witcher
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2 once again we see the same pattern
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where these two cards are very competitive with each other however we're going to call that a win for the
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7870 and the 660 legs behind the 660 Ti
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and the 670 which is to be expected because it's cheaper finally Metro 2033
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see this is the what they're all supposed to be aligned like this so that
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you can easily compare which cards perform in line with which other cards
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so here we had these two cards perform very similarly it looks like almost like
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a memory bandwidth bottleneck because you can see the 670 really pulls away
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and it doesn't have that 192 memory bus like these two cards both have and they
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both perform very similarly to the 7870
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in this context so thank you for checking out my video review of the MSI
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GeForce GTX 660 non TI this is the twin
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frozer Edition card don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for more
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