Introduction

The newest member of NVIDIA's GeForce Kepler family is also its most important. The new GeForce GTX 660 Ti launched today targets a cost-performance sweet-spot with its US $299 reference price. What makes this price-point of particular importance to GPU makers is that graphics cards priced around it compete directly with premium game console bundles from the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 line, transforming ordinary desktop PCs into lean and mean gaming monstrosities. By NVIDIA's own statistics, PCs are growing as a gaming platform, and the $299 price-point is one of its prime movers.

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti is derived from the 28 nm GK104 silicon, the same chip that powers GeForce GTX 670, Kepler poster-boy GeForce GTX 680, and the flagship GeForce GTX 690. It is closer to the GeForce GTX 670 in more specifications than the GTX 680 is, down to the same chip. It has the same number of CUDA cores with 1,344, and the same set of clock speeds with 915 MHz core, 980 MHz GPU Boost, and 6.00 GHz memory. The only points of difference between the two are memory bus width with 192-bit (against 256-bit on the GTX 670), and ROP count with 24 (against 32 on the GTX 670). The memory bus is narrower by 25%, resulting in a memory bandwidth of 144 GB/s (against 192 GB/s on the GTX 670).

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti, with its starting price of $299, is also NVIDIA's most expensive performance-segment GPU to date. Its predecession includes the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, the GTX 460 1 GB, the GTX 260, and the 9800 GT – all of which had slightly lower price points. Given that AMD has two SKUs in close-quarters with this price-point, the Radeon HD 7870 and Radeon HD 7950, NVIDIA would have chosen this price-point as well. In this review, we test this notion.



Palit's GeForce GTX 660 Ti comes with a large dual-fan, triple-slot cooler promising good thermal performance and low noise. The card is also overclocked out of the box to provide an additional performance improvement over the relatively low clocks of the NVIDIA GTX 660 Ti reference design. Price-wise, Palit is asking $330 for their card, a $30 increase over the NVIDIA reference design.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + documentation
• Borderlands 2 Steam coupon
• PCI-Express power cable
• HDMI to DVI adapter
• Palit sticker

The Card

Palit's card looks exactly like the GTX 670 JetStream which we reviewed not too long ago. A large dual-fan cooler covers the card. As you can see from the second photo, the actual PCB is quite a bit shorter than the cooler - something we've seen before on the GTX 670.


The card requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include two dual-link DVI ports, one full-size HDMI port and one full-size DisplayPort. You may use all the outputs at the same time thanks to NVIDIA Kepler's new display output controller.

An HDMI sound device is included in the GPU as well. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible and includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support. The DisplayPort outputs are version 1.2 which enables the use of hubs and Multi-Stream Transport.


You may combine up to four GTX 660 Ti cards from any vendor in a multi-GPU SLI configuration for higher frame-rates or better image- quality settings.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods, etc., please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.