Tom's Hardware - "Seven GeForce GTX 660 Ti Cards: Exploring Memory Bandwidth"

Image source: Tom's Hardware

Tom's Hardware posted a pretty interesting article looking at the recently-released GTX 660 Ti. Specifically, the article takes a look at seven cards from various manufacturers and examines the impact of the 660 Ti's 192-bit memory bus on gaming performance when anti-aliasing is cranked up. One feature of the article that I thought was cool was their noise comparison amongst the cards; seems like Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI are still among the best options.

I still don't know what to think of the 660 Ti. The card seems like a dud at the $300 price point now that you can find HD 7950s in the $290-300 range after rebate. Present performance aside, the 7950's 3GB of VRAM and 384-bit memory bus are going to have a lot more staying power than the 660 Ti's 2GB and 192-bit bus. If you're planning on upgrading your GPU every 12 months or so that might not matter, but for someone on a budget the prospect of a card lasting 2-3 years sounds pretty nice.

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.