Excellent news. All manufacturers should strive to better their products, even after it's released. Plextor does this with their SSD's, it's great to see Asus doing the same for their GPU's. :)

1c3d0gExcellent news. All manufacturers should strive to better their products, even after it's released. Plextor does this with their SSD's, it's great to see Asus doing the same for their GPU's. :)

Friendly reminder:
www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_660_Ti_Power_Edition/33.html

It seems that MSI has added some secret sauce, no other board partner has, to their card's BIOS.

Seems to be a direct result of reviews like this one on HardwareCanucks.

I hope someone does a followup test to see if this update now makes ASUS' card the top performer.

I'm all for improving products, but I'm curious what is going on.

Were these chips not sufficiently binned to run their clock within the stock voltage/tdp set by nvidia?

Wonder if that is what the whole 'Nvidia does not condone cards clocked above 1100mhz' thing was about. The cards I've seen this mentioned about seem to boost above 1100mhz at stock. MSI is 1098...but also according to Shrout over at PCper had a lower tdp boost range...+14% vs 23-25% from everyone else (insinuating they already upped the power level 10% the stock cap). Obviously when overclocking people up the tdp hence why over 1100mhz is often stable, and that is probably what these cards are doing (to some extent...likely not even close to the full range) with the new bios.

Hmm...wonder if it was something as simple as boosting over 1100mhz clocks went over 150w by just a smidge. Probably. New TDP is probably just barely lower than 670 at stock so it won't piss nvidia off...like 165w (vs. 170w of stock 670) while keeping the max at ~180w (or whatever it is)...something to that effect.

These TDP-limiting techs (including Powertune...especially with boost) continue to prove they are bullshit.

Awesome I hope W1zz can do a re-test, I have been looking at this ASUS and the MSI to buy as my next card!

alwaysstsThese TDP-limiting techs (including Powertune...especially with boost) continue to prove they are bullshit.

Ah, Nvidia’s dynamic clock “nanny” works with thermals and TDP to juggle vary’s what boost (clocks) it provides. Also, how tolerant or oppressive a nanny your card get varies by AIB, and even between card model from that same AIB. There a lot left to the luck of the draw.
AMD boost is much less reliant and will when it can deliver the claim boost.
Totally different approches!

Thanks for this. I usually only check driver updates and may have missed this completely.