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Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti review

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Verdict

Nvidia’s GTX 660 Ti speeds past AMD and snatches the crown as the mid-range graphics champion

Review Date: 16 Aug 2012

Reviewed By: Mike Jennings

Price when reviewed: £234 (£281 inc VAT)

Overall Rating

Features & Design
6 stars out of 6

Value for Money
5 stars out of 6

Performance
5 stars out of 6

PCPRO Recommended

High-end cards are all well and good for the privileged few, but the real money is in the mid-range. It’s an area in which Nvidia has enjoyed significant success, thanks to its GeForce GTX 460 and GTX 560 chipsets, and its latest effort, the GTX 660 Ti, aims to continue this dominance.

Nvidia hasn’t strayed from its successful Kepler architecture to make its latest card, with the GK104 core used in the GTX 690, 680 and 670 once again pressed into service. This time, it’s the lesser of those three cards, the GTX 670, that forms the blueprint of the GTX 660 Ti.

Very little of the GTX 670’s architecture has been changed to form the GTX 660 Ti. Both cards make do with seven of the eight Graphics Processing Clusters used in the GTX 680; this means that both include 1,344 stream processors – a small step down from the 1,536 utilised in Nvidia’s top-end chip. The differences between the two cards are minor: both include 112 texture units but, while the GTX 670 used 32 Render Output Units, the GTX 660 Ti has to make do with 24 – a change that could impact on the new card’s ability to cope with demanding anti-aliasing.

Both cards include a 915MHz core clock with a maximum boost clock of 980MHz, and the 294mm² die still includes 3.5 billion transistors. There’s 2GB of GDDR5 RAM included in the GTX 660 Ti and, like the GTX 570, it’s clocked at 6,008MHz – the most significant difference is that the GTX 660 Ti utilises a 192-bit bus rather than the 256-bit interface of the GTX 670.

The tweaked specification results in reasonable theoretical throughput figures: the GTX 660 Ti’s total memory bandwidth of 144.2GB/sec is lower than the 192.2GB/sec of the GTX 670, but its texture filtering rate of 102.5GT/sec is equal to that of Nvidia’s higher-end card.

Those figures would have trounced its main rival, too, but AMD has been busy tweaking its Radeon HD 7950 in the run-up to the GTX 660 Ti’s launch; a new BIOS update sees its clock speed boosted from 800MHz to 925MHz. That bumps its theoretical throughput figures up to 240GB/sec and 103.6GT/sec respectively.

There was precious little to choose between AMD and Nvidia in our Very High quality Crysis test, with the GTX 660 Ti scoring 66fps and the AMD HD 7950 falling two frames behind. The gap widened in the same test at 2,560 x 1,440, with the GTX 660 Ti’s 48fps score leaping six frames ahead of its rival. The roles were reversed when we hooked up three screens – at 5,760 x 1,080, the recent BIOS update helped the Radeon to score 35fps compared to the GTX 660 Ti’s 26fps.

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Comments

User comments

How is almost £300 for a graphics card mid-range?

to me it sounds like the average person (who would buy a graphics card-which is probably the minority) would spend almost £300 on a graphics card. like the average person has a medium coke at macdonalds. or regular. i dont know.

this is a high-end graphics card for most people im guessing. anything higher and you're going into elite class territory-the class where the tooth fairy leaves a porsche under the pillow and a tv set means setting up a £100,000 cinema system in one of the spare rooms, whilst the rest of us can only gleam these live through mtv cribs or whatever other fascinating tv program makes us go 'wow'.

or am i completely wrong?

By domster2 on 16 Aug 2012

@domster2

You're completely right.

I'm getting fed up with this PC Pro idea that PCs are only for playing the most demanding fight games.

By seagull on 16 Aug 2012

PC Pro's Own Verdict

Following on from domster2
PC Pro's review on 22 Oct for the AMD Radeon HD 6850 which is still on the A List: "Verdict Repositioned to the mid-range, it’s the best-value mainstream card on the market"

Presumably since the 6850 is still on the list at £120 that this amount is still regarded as the true "mid range price point"

Least I hope PC Pro hasn't changed it's opinion.

By simontompkins on 16 Aug 2012

You must be Joking !

The last Proper mid range value for money card in my opinion was the GTX460,which I bought for £170.The prices for supposedly 'mid range' card are now just getting stupid.This should have been a £180 card at most.
I think if i want better performance in future , i'll just buy another second hand 460 off ebay for around £100 and SLI them.

By Jaberwocky on 16 Aug 2012

Video Editing Benchmark

How about comparing the capabilities of these cards when used with Premier Pro?

By bonnetti on 23 Aug 2012

Mid range is a relative thing.

When GFX cards cost £100-400 midrange was £150-200. Now GFX cards cost £50-800 midrange is £120-300. Seems fairly well scaled to me.
A GTX650ti can be got for as little as £116 and would tear the GTX460 a new one, mid range enough for you? Price ranges got bigger since 2010.

By gpzjock on 2 May 2013