NVIDIA's new GTX 660 adds to the company's product stack by providing a fully featured gaming solution at the crucial price point of around $200. The reference design sits right between AMD's HD 7850 and HD 7870 in terms of performance. ZOTAC's GTX 660 is a close to reference implementation of the GTX 660, which means it does not come with any major changes to the PCB design. Its clocks are essentially those of NVIDIA's reference design with a tiny 13 MHz bump. This little increase helps the card gain a 1% performance increase, nothing relevant in real life, over the NVIDIA GTX 660 reference design. No overclock out of the box means that overclocking will result in a bigger relative performance increase because the factory overclock does not eat into your manual clock headroom. ZOTAC's choice for a smaller cooler makes this one of the shortest, dual-slot gaming cards, which might come in handy in building a small gaming PC. Overall gaming performance of the ZOTAC GTX 660 is enough for most titles at full HD with maximum details and anti-aliasing enabled.
Compared to the GK104 based cards, like GTX 680, 670 and 660 Ti, the new GK106 graphics processor offers significantly improved non-gaming power draw, which beats anything similar AMD has to offer, especially when running multiple monitors or Blu-ray. The HD 7800 is the winner when it comes to gaming power consumption despite NVIDIA having the better boost clock technology to improve performance per Watt. AMD also has ZeroCore power which turns the card off while the screen is off during, for example, overnight download sessions.
The GTX 660 just requires a single 6-pin PCI-Express power connector, whereas the HD 7870 requires two. While this might look more attractive for entry-levels PSUs, the actual power consumption is roughly similar. A single connector here only helps reduce cable clutter.
We've seen ZOTAC's cooler before on the GTX 660 Ti, and it does a good job at keeping the card cool. We also measured very low noise-levels from the card - in both idle and load, which is a selling point over the HD 7870. The GTX 660 has, based on all our GTX 660 reviews, a clear advantage in noise levels when compared to the HD 7800 Series. Temperatures are fine on all cards, thanks to the low heat output of the GPU.
NVIDIA's reference design price point seems a bit high with $229, considering the faster HD 7870 retails at $250. ZOTAC is sticking with that price despite putting their custom cooler on the board and increasing clocks a little bit. Price/performance considered, the GTX 660 cannot beat the HD 7870 and can only, at best, match it. When comparing the GTX 660 with the HD 7870, I don't see a clear win for either product - both will make you a happy gamer. The GTX 660 has lower idle power, better noise, and CUDA/PhysX. The HD 7870 has higher performance, better gaming power consumption, and ZeroCore power. Then there is also the HD 7850 1 GB, which offers incredible price/performance for budget conscious shoppers. Overall, it's too close to call. Future price reductions will make the difference.