GPU News: GTX 660 and 650, AMD's Countermove, and Next-Gen

The GPU market has been pretty active over the last couple of days. After last week's new releases AMD and Nvidia basically have all of their chips on the table at this point. Time for price cut battles and holiday discounts over the next few months.

GTX 650, 660 Unveiled

Last Thursday, Nvidia released the GTX 650 and GTX 660 graphics cards in an effort to fill the gigantic void in their 600-series lineup. The 650 is Nvidia's budget gaming offering and comes in at $110. The 660 falls in line behind the 660 Ti at $230.

I thought about making my own nifty little table showing the tech specs of the newest cards in comparison with what's already on the market, but TechPowerUp already has an incredibly extensive one that would put mine to shame. Here it is:

Source: TechPowerUp

Enable Power-Saving Mode on NVIDIA GPUs with Multiple Monitors

A few months ago I pulled an old 17" LCD out of the closet and decided to try out a dual-monitor setup. The extra screen real estate is amazing; I can watch MLB.tv or SC2 streams on the second monitor or check out system temps while I'm gaming. There's one issue that I quickly noticed, however - my 560 Ti wasn't downclocking at all, instead running full blast and idling around 15°C warmer than usual. Nvidia says that this happens with monitors running at two separate screen resolutions and that forcing the cards to run at full power prevents screen flickering.

Thankfully, there's a program called NVIDIA Inspector that includes a handy utility: Multi Display Power Saver. You can download the most recent version (1.9.6.6) here.

After installing and running the program, right-click on the "Show Overclocking" button and run the Multi Display Power Saver. You should see something similar to the following:

Select the GPU you wish to downclock from the list at the top right and you should be good to go. This forces the GPU into a low-power state to keep energy usage and temperatures down. To allow the GPU to switch back into a higher state for games and other programs, you can either set a threshold with the sliders at the bottom or just whitelist each of your games individually. It adds an extra step to the installation process every time you want to play a new game, but it's otherwise pretty easy. To whitelist a game, right-click the area under "Full 3D Applications" and select "Add from File" to manually find the EXE or "Add from running GPU Process" if you have the program running in the background. The right-hand box of "Video Applications" include programs that should be run in a medium power state, so I've got things like media players and the plugin containers for Firefox and Chrome that handle video playback listed here. I threw the included Windows games in there too for shits and giggles; after all, I require premium performance during my Solitaire and Free Cell gaming sessions.

There's an option to start the MDPS utility at Windows startup, but I ran into a conflict with this program and MSI Afterburner, which I use for overclocking. While the MDPS is active for a certain GPU you won't be able to change any of its clocks, so if Afterburner starts up after MDPS you'll run into a problem. If you encounter this issue, the easiest fix is to delay the startup of MDPS by 30 seconds or so to give Afterburner time to start and enable your overclock. There are several ways of delaying startup - downloadable applications, batch files, or the Windows Task Scheduler - and you can find more information here and here.

The same problem I mentioned above exists when you're overclocking, but there's an easy workaround. Simply uncheck your GPU from the list on the MDPS window, tweak whatever needs tweaking in Afterburner or your program of choice, and recheck your GPU in MDPS once you're finished. You can actually use NVIDIA Inspector to handle your overclocking if you want, and it includes voltage control.

As a result of using the Multi Display Power Saver, my idle temps dropped from around 40°C to 26°C. If you're using multiple monitors with Nvidia cards and you're worried about downclocking, definitely give MDPS a look.

Download NVIDIA Inspector 1.9.6.6 from Guru3D: http://downloads.guru3d.com/NVIDIA-Inspector-1.9.6.6-download-2612.html

Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review Roundup

I grabbed my current video card, an MSI GTX 560 Ti, in February 2011- and to the dismay of my wallet I'm starting to get the upgrade itch again. With today's release of the GTX 660 Ti, both Nvidia and AMD now have all of their cards on the table when it comes to this generation of performance gaming cards.

	Release Date	Current Price
GTX 680	03/22/12	$500
HD 7970	01/09/12	$420
GTX 670	05/10/12	$400
HD 7950	01/31/12	$350
GTX 660 Ti	08/16/12	$300
HD 7870	03/05/12	$300
HD 7850	03/05/12	$230

I spent this morning reading a bunch of reviews of the 660 Ti from various sites:

• Anandtech
• Tom's Hardware
• HARDOCP
• TechPowerUp
• Guru3D

The general consensus going into each review was a concern for the 660 Ti's 192-bit memory bus. In cutting down from the 256-bit bus of the GTX 670, you're looking at a theoretical drop in performance of up to 25% in memory-intensive applications. Thankfully the price was also cut by 25% when compared to the 670, so any improvement over that number makes the 660 Ti a pretty solid performer for the money.

TweakTown GTX660 Ti "Review"

Nvidia is probably going to release the GTX660 Ti some time in August, and the rumor mill is actively trying to nail down the final specs. TweakTown supposedly got their hands on a 2GB reference model and put it through its paces. The review can be found here:

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/4869/nvidia_geforce_gtx_660_ti_2gb_reference_video_card_review/index1.html

Obviously we won't know the truth for another week or two, so take those results with a grain of salt. I'm currently running a 1GB 560 Ti, so the prospect of flipping my old card and upgrading to a 660 Ti for ~$100 seems pretty tempting if these benchmarks are accurate. Performance in the 7950/7970 range for $250-300? Yes please.