NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 660 Ti will be a hit of that I am sure. The card delivers excellent performance levels at reasonable power consumption, which enables board partners to create low-noise custom designs. The new GTX 660 Ti is almost twice as fast as the last-generation GTX 560 Ti, but comes at a $50 higher introductory cost.
ZOTAC's GTX 660 Ti uses the (short) NVIDIA reference PCB and pairs it with a custom dual fan cooler that matches the PCB's length. This makes the card very short, which will be a blessing for many users with smaller cases - especially ITX builds come to mind. The card does not look cheap or weak in any way despite being compact. I would classify its visual appearance as "cute in a good way". Thanks to the overclock out of the box, the card achieves a 6% performance improvement over the reference design. This makes the card just 7% slower than GTX 670 and 6% faster than AMD's HD 7950, which is more expensive. ZOTAC's card is also the only one we tested today that comes with a 150 MHz memory overclock out of the box.
ZOTAC's cooler keeps the card at good temperature levels and idle fan noise is super low as well. Only under load does fan noise end up being higher than other GTX 660 Ti cards reviewed today - maybe because of its compact cooler. I would have gladly accepted slightly higher temperatures for less noise. The card runs at 70°C under load, so there is plenty of headroom for potential fan noise reduction. While overclocking does provide a significant performance boost, reaching GTX 670 levels, we have seen better overclocking potential from other cards today, but the difference is relatively small.
Overall, the card is a very solid implementation of a custom GTX 660 Ti design, and its price of $330 is the same as all other GTX 660 Ti cards we reviewed today. At that price, the card easily beats AMD's HD 7950 in all important criteria: performance, power, noise, heat, performance per Dollar, and performance per Watt. A lower price, around the $300 mark, would put more pressure on AMD though, and make the card more interesting for the group of gamers shopping in the $250-$300 range.