GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review MSI Power Edition 1080p Performance Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,727 words · ~8 min read
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hello my friend stay a while and
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listen awful but this review isn't so
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this is all about the GeForce 660 Ti
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which is the all new NVIDIA graphics card that is coming in at a lower price
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point than the GTX 670 which came in at a lower price point than the GTX 680 but
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what's crazy about this is that they're all built on the same Graphics whoops
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core technology which is the GK 104 core
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that means you've got full support for adaptive vsync you've got full support
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for the latest anti-aliasing modes including FXAA and txaa you've got GPU
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boost which is very cool which basically just detects how power hungry the game
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you're running is and if it happens to be a little bit less power hungry and it
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can squeeze some more GPU frequency out of the core and maintain the power
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threshold and heat threshold that the card needs
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then it will actually increase the clock of your GPU giving you better FPS in
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real world applications games so that's
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really cool while it may not be as good for benchmarking and furmark which most
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people don't need to do because what you really want to do with a graphics card
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is play games then I totally vote for that technology so there's a couple
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different cards that we're looking at here today the one that we did the bulk of the benchmarking on is the GTX 660 Ti
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power Edition from MSI however we also did take some readings with the Galaxy
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GTX 660ti GC with their dual fan cooler
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so what we did find was that due to the overvolting capability of the power
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Edition we were able to overclock higher on this card however the Galaxy card did
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run significantly cooler about 7° cooler
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than the MSI card under a realistic gaming load so in this case we use
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crisis 2 in order to get all of our gaming load temperatures as well as our
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gaming load power consumption and we are
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using let's see which games do we test so we tested crisis 2 Witcher 2 Skyrim
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which didn't end up being very GPU Limited at all so that one was kind of
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pointless Metro 2033 as well as one
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other game which is escaping me right now but maybe slick can remind
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me yeah we already said Witcher Battlefield 3 Battlefield 3 so we did
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five games finding out where these cards fall in terms of performance so we did
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the 660 Ti because that's the card of
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the day okay 660ti very important performance numbers we did the 560ti
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because we wanted to see how the new 660 Ti performs compared to the card that it
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is replacing in that sort of $250 to
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$300 segment although the 660 Ti comes in at the high end of that segment we
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did the 670 to find out how the 660 Ti
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compares to its older brother so if you want to Shell out another hundred bucks
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what do you get we did the Radeon hd7870
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and in this case we used a what is this a hawk yeah Hawk Edition card because it
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doesn't cost much more than a regular 7870 and we want to compare real 660 Ti
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you can buy to real cards that you can buy on the market today to compare it
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against we actually have a sapphire 7950 that's running on that test bench over
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there that we use to compare because the 660 Ti Falls right between the 7870 and
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the 7950 in terms of pricing but what you're going to see is that at 1080p
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performance is actually closer to a 7950
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than it is to a 7870 so that is the range of cards stick
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with me guys and we're going to walk through all the performance numbers
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together of this all new and very exciting graphics card so we're going to
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start with crisis 2 benchmarks so you can see right here the GTX 660 Ti power
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Edition actually performs as well or
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better than the 7950 dual x from Sapphire remember this is an overclocked
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Factory overclocked 7950 and dramatically outperforms the 7870 Hawk
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it actually comes within spitting distance this is a bit of an anomaly this difference in the minimum FPS so
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the red bar is average and the blue bar is minimum but you can see it performs
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within about 10% of the 660 670 reference card which means that
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once we overclock this a little more we can probably get pretty close and I'm going to be doing a separate video about
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overclocking the 560 TI gets destroyed in every possible way so if you have one
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of these the 660ti is a worthy upgrade
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it should be noted we're running on the ultra highest presets at 1080p with
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medium motion blur and highres textures enabled this is a custom game run
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through every Benchmark we do is a run through ingame recorded with fraps we
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are not using any canned benchmarks on this YouTube
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show Battlefield 3 is another big win
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for the 660 Ti so this is at Ultra presets and this is single player
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gameplay guys we are going to do a separate video comparing the GTX 66 60
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TI to the 7950 directly in Battlefield 3
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multiplayer we've been asked for that a lot of times so look for that on my
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channel as well in the next little while here and Slick's going to do some
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runthrough in a nice full server where you can really see how these perform in
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a the most intensive possible Battlefield 3 scenario so moving right
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along uh yeah big winner it has a slightly lower dip in terms of minimum
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FPS compared to the 7950 duel but it should be noted that because we're doing
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real run throughs you have to take these minimum dips with a grain of salt
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because you never know some weird glitches can happen to the best of
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graphics cards and you can't really control that the 560ti gets its butt
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handed to it thoroughly again I think a big part of this is due to the fact that
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it's only got one gig of video memory when everything else here has 2 gigs 3
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gigs 2 gigs and two gigs and you can once again see the 660 Ti plat power
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Edition almost Platinum Edition can you tell can you tell I've been like doing
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this a long time the last card called Platinum Edition was an x800
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uh AGP yes and uh gets dangerously close
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to that 670 performance Mark Skyrim with high texture pack
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enabled also just destroyed our 560 TI
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this was not pretty so let's uh let's
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sort of just you know ignore that so we'll have a look at how the 660ti did
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this is one where the 670 with its additional memory bandwidth seemed to
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really pull away from the 660ti but even then the 660 Ti hung with with the 7950
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as opposed to with the 7870 for Witcher 2 you were using a
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slightly custom configuration High spec with vertical sync disabled so that we
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can get the maximum FPS mind you it never really goes over 120 FPS anyway
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we're using a 120 Herz monitor so on this one you see that the 7950 dipped a
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little bit low this is not representative it should be more like
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probably in this range it was a bit of an anomaly however we can still look at
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the average FPS numbers and see that the 660 Ti
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for the first time landed around where its price point is which is between a
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7870 and a 7950 instead of running right
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with the 7950 which is a more expensive GPU the 670 again performs a little bit
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better than the 660 Ti so no real surprises here and once again in Metro
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2033 the GTX 660 Ti destroys the card
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it's replacing and it's not as close to the 670 in this one but actually here
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I'm going to cheat I'm going to show you guys a pre from our overclocked
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performance guide but you're going to see that in Metro 2033 the 660ti oh no
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it still Trails behind it big way in Metro okay forget it so
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it's it's more like a 7870 in terms of
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performance in this particular title but I think this shows us a good
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cross-section of which titles the 660 Ti
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performs more like a 7950 and which titles it performs kind
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of exactly where it's supposed to be and in a worst casee scenario it performs
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about like a 7870 which is what the pricing is sort of closest to if you
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don't factor in mail in rebates however if you factor in mail in rebates some of
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the 787s are priced pretty aggressively so I think that pretty much wraps it up
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if you want 3D Vision if you want NVIDIA's surround as opposed to AMD
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Affinity if you want fizx then you will have to go with a GeForce card and if
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you want the best price to Performance ratio right now for GeForce the 660ti is
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looking like it because it just rocks
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the last generation stuff in terms of performance without demanding a huge
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premium on the price so thank you for checking out this review for 1080p
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performance of the GTX 660 Ti remember we got a couple here so there is an SLI
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performance review coming where we're going to be comparing it directly to a
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GTX 680 because all of a sudden buying
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two of these is not that much more expensive than buying a single 680 so
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that's an interesting scenario cuz they should perform pretty well so we got two
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of them we'll show them off then and I think that pretty much wraps it up don't
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