Gainward GTX 660Ti review - conveniently fast

Of course, we were able to keep the card under 70C in our testing (only just), with the fan speed set to 65 per cent, though at these speeds you can hear air movement over the cooling fins, and also hear the electric motors ever so faintly powering the fans. This won’t be as noticeable inside a PC case obviously, so people chasing performance over complete silence are also being catered for by Gainward this time around.

In game testing the GTX 660Ti held its own in most scenarios; remembering that all tests are conducted at 2560 x 1600 (except 3Dmark), you quickly see how important the memory bandwidth can be, with the GTX 670 sitting ahead in every game by a noticeable margin.

Given the memory restrictions of the GTX 660Ti, AMD is still able to stay ahead, no doubt with the additional help of the new 7950 BIOS. It does seem that it’s hard to justify the purchase of a GTX 660Ti for anyone using multiple monitors or a single large resolution screen, and should instead look at the HD7950 as a budget option, and the 7970 and 680 as premium choices.

The only thing left to discuss really is the price. Given that at the time of writing we only have the ‘USD $299 RPP’ from the Nvidia press release, and the ‘around $399 RRP’ from the vendors we’ve spoken to, we’d take an educated guess and say that this card and most others will hover around the $359 mark upon launch, falling quickly to the low $300s in the following months.

Either way it will be interesting, as highly-overclocked 7870s are already floating around the market, and some are even capable of beating the reference designed 7950. If local distributors and retailers set their prices too high, we may simply see a rush of low-$300 7870’s flying off the shelf with people refusing to pay the higher local price on the GTX 660Ti when compared with other countries.

We’d love it if we were wrong, and for once we’d love to see a $299 launch fall in-line with the US, but we’re not holding our breath. At the end of the day mid-$300 is a fair price to pay for a card that can max out most games at HD resolutions comfortably, and even give super-HD resolutions a run for their money when some memory overclocks are applied. Nvidia just need to work a little on its overclocking for the next generation, as the 1100MHz HD7870 samples like the one from Gigabyte pack a competitive punch.

NOTES

3DMark 11 – Performance preset

Unigine 3.0 – Extreme everything, 2560x1440, 2XAA 8xAF, FPS

Battlefield 3 - 2560x1440, 2xAA 8xAF, FPS timed run around multiplayer map

Batman: Arkham City - 2560x1440, 16xAA 16xAF,