Nvidia'due south GeForce GTX 680 may have swiped the performance crown away from AMD'due south Radeon Hd 7970 before this twelvemonth, but at $500, the initial Kepler offering was inaccessible to most system builders. That state of affairs improved slightly in May with the GTX 670, a popular option amid enthusiasts for delivering an incredible value. In our testing, it provided GTX 680-like operation at a $100 disbelieve.

Although nothing matched the GTX 670's price-to-performance ratio, the $400 entry fee remained a steep one. Gamers who wanted to spend less were left with the $230 HD 7850, the $300 Hd 7870 or a bill of fare from Nvidia'due south concluding-gen lineup. Naturally, it would merely exist a matter of time before Nvidia tried to fill this gap with tons of hearsay virtually a GeForce GTX 660 Ti in the pipeline for a mid to late summertime launch.

Well, we're here and the rumors proved true: Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 660 Ti has its crosshairs assault the HD 7870. Assuming it's priced competitively (more on this in a 2nd), the GTX 660 Ti seems like it could put a existent hurting on AMD'southward offer, equally it features the same Dna equally existing Kepler products and boasts the same number of CUDA cores and texture units as the GTX 670.

Nvidia has been pretty ambitious with Kepler'due south pricing and we'd await for the GTX 660 Ti to retail for about $300. Considering the fact that we expect information technology to deliver operation on par with the $350 HD 7950, this could spell disaster for AMD, prompting the outfit to administer however some other price cut. As fun as it is to speculate, allow's motility on and meet where our evaluation board from Gigabyte stands...

Gigabyte'southward GTX 660 Ti in Particular

There isn't an official Nvidia reference lath for the GTX 660 Ti, leaving it upwards to manufacturing partners to come upward with their own products. This ways PCB designs and length could vary significantly between cards.

We were sent Gigabyte'southward take on the GTX 660 Ti (GV-N66TOC-2GD). The board's PCB measures 8.46" (21.5cm) long, which is quite meaty on its own, but the cooler pushes that to 9.84" (25.0cm), slightly longer than the Hd 7870 reference design. At this length, Gigabyte's GTX 660 Ti should easily fit in well-nigh ATX cases every bit it's yet much shorter than college-end cards such as the HD 7970.

The GTX 660 Ti'southward GPU ships with 1344 CUDA cores and vii SMX units, 1 SMX unit of measurement and 192 CUDA cores less than the GTX 680 but the same number equally the GTX 670. The TAU count also matches the GTX 670, while the ROPs accept been reduced from 32 to 24.

The memory subsystem has inverse from the GTX 680 and GTX 670, which have four 64-bit controllers for a 256-chip broad bus, to one 64-bit controller with a 192-chip double-decker. Combine that with 2048MB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1502MHz (6008MHz DDR) and you cease up with a bandwidth of 144.2GB/s, which isn't bad, though it is 33% less than the GTX 670 and that's where the functioning difference lies.

Nvidia's specification for the base clock frequency is 915MHz, while the average boost clock speed is 980MHz. Gigabyte has increased this to 1032MHz and 1111MHz, while the retentiveness operates at the standard 6008MHz.

What really makes Gigabyte's iteration unique is its WindForce 2X solution. The cooler employs dual 75mm ultra quiet PWM fans continued to a custom shroud. Under these fans is a massive heatsink consisting of three master parts connected by 8mm copper heatpipes.

At the eye of this setup is the biggest block, which has a unique RAM heatsink to absurd the GDDR5 modules and "Triangle Cool" technology that uses a serial of fins and triangular clip modules to better directly airflow over the heatsink.

Gigabyte says its Triangle Absurd technology can reduce temperatures past up to 10% over traditional designs, so nosotros're keen to see just how cool this carte runs.

To feed the card plenty juice, Nvidia's specification calls for dual 6-pin PCI Express power connectors -- identical to the Hard disk drive 7870, 7850 and GTX 670. Nvidia also says those wishing to use a single GTX 660 Ti graphics card should take a 450 watt ability supply or greater.

Naturally, the GTX 660 Ti supports SLI (3-style SLI in this case), and then information technology has a pair of connectors. The only other ports are on the I/O panel where yous'll find a pair of dual-link DVI-I connectors, a unmarried HDMI one.4a port, and a DisplayPort 1.ii socket.