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- GTX 660 Ti
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If you've been eyeing a 600-series graphics card from Nvidia, but felt the GeForce GT 640 was a bit too underpowered and the GTX 670 too expensive, then today we have good news, Nvidia has announced the new GeForce GTX 660 Ti GPU and its partners are all launching new cards based on the GPU. We've already have confirmations of the GeForce GTX 660 Ti having native support in OS X 10.8, so it's time to burn your hard earned cash if you've been waiting for Nvidia's slightly more affordable high-end card.
Compared to the GeForce GTX 670, the biggest change is that the GeForce GTX 660 Ti has a 192-bit memory interface compared to a 256-bit memory interface. This means reduced memory bandwidth from 192.2GB/s to 144.2GB/s which as you might've already guessed will have a certain impact on the performance. Nvidia has also cut off eight ROPs or raster operations processor which again will have a certain impact on the performance. The correlation here is that Nvidia's Kepler based GK104 GPU's are made up out of eight blocks and in the case of the GeForce GTX 660 Ti, one of these blocks has been disabled and this is what results in the loss of part of the memory interface and the eight ROP's.
The good news is that the rest of the GPU has remained the same, so in other words, you still get 1,344 CUDA cores/shaders, 112 texture units, 2GB of GDDR5 memory and a GPU core clock of at least 915MHz and an effective memory clock of 6008MHz. Thanks to a small part of the GPU being disabled and a narrower memory bus, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti also has a lower TDP of 150W, compared to 170W for the GeForce GTX 670. Connectivity comes in the shape of two DVI ports of which both are dual-link (i.e. supports resolutions higher than 1920x1200), one HDMI port and one standard size DisplayPort.
One oddity about the GeForce GTX 660 Ti cards is that despite the 192-bit memory bus, the cards come with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. Nvidia's solution to the "problem" was simply to use mixed amounts of memory in the past, but for the GTX 660 Ti the company has implemented a solution which relies on four memory chips being connected to one of the three memory controllers, while the other two memory controllers interface with only two chips. Interestingly this doesn't seem to have any noticeable impact on performance, so clearly Nvidia's engineers have done their homework and come up with a solution that works well despite being a very unusual way of doing things.
So what about performance? Well, we can only go on Windows based numbers for the time being, but the GeForce GTX 660 Ti is keeping its own at resolutions of up to 1920x1200 in most games with all the eye candy turned on. We suggest hitting up some of the hardware review sites for detailed benchmarks, but for those of you that have wanted a Radeon HD 7870 or 7950, this is the card that fits right in-between the two and even beating the Radeon HD 7950 in some games. We've included some graphs from Nvidia showing relative performance compared to some of its other products.
The important thing to keep in mind here is that the GeForce GTX 660 Ti is something of a bargain at $299.99 for the performance it delivers, as it's cheaper than a Radeon HD 7950, yet only marginally more expensive than a Radeon HD 7870. Admittedly it's anything but a bargain basement card, however, as AMD's 7000-series of GPU's don't work in OS X, at least not yet, although we're still holding out some hope that the next iMac will feature an AMD GPU and at $100 less than the GeForce GTX 670, it's currently the card we'd pick if you want to play games in OS X or Windows. Nvidia should be announcing some more affordable models next month, but they'll be based on a slightly different GPU, so we'll have to wait and see what the support in OS X is. At least the GeForce GTX 660 Ti should be a straightforward card to use with your CustoMac.
Source: Nvidia
Relate:
GeForce GTX 660 Ti on Amazon
Reminder: NVIDIA GeForce 6xx Kepler Cards work with GraphicsEnabler=No
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti, GTX 660, GTX 650 Ti and GTS 650 launch dates leak
GeForce GTX 660 Ti pricing revealed
Compared to the GeForce GTX 670, the biggest change is that the GeForce GTX 660 Ti has a 192-bit memory interface compared to a 256-bit memory interface. This means reduced memory bandwidth from 192.2GB/s to 144.2GB/s which as you might've already guessed will have a certain impact on the performance. Nvidia has also cut off eight ROPs or raster operations processor which again will have a certain impact on the performance. The correlation here is that Nvidia's Kepler based GK104 GPU's are made up out of eight blocks and in the case of the GeForce GTX 660 Ti, one of these blocks has been disabled and this is what results in the loss of part of the memory interface and the eight ROP's.
The good news is that the rest of the GPU has remained the same, so in other words, you still get 1,344 CUDA cores/shaders, 112 texture units, 2GB of GDDR5 memory and a GPU core clock of at least 915MHz and an effective memory clock of 6008MHz. Thanks to a small part of the GPU being disabled and a narrower memory bus, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti also has a lower TDP of 150W, compared to 170W for the GeForce GTX 670. Connectivity comes in the shape of two DVI ports of which both are dual-link (i.e. supports resolutions higher than 1920x1200), one HDMI port and one standard size DisplayPort.
One oddity about the GeForce GTX 660 Ti cards is that despite the 192-bit memory bus, the cards come with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. Nvidia's solution to the "problem" was simply to use mixed amounts of memory in the past, but for the GTX 660 Ti the company has implemented a solution which relies on four memory chips being connected to one of the three memory controllers, while the other two memory controllers interface with only two chips. Interestingly this doesn't seem to have any noticeable impact on performance, so clearly Nvidia's engineers have done their homework and come up with a solution that works well despite being a very unusual way of doing things.
So what about performance? Well, we can only go on Windows based numbers for the time being, but the GeForce GTX 660 Ti is keeping its own at resolutions of up to 1920x1200 in most games with all the eye candy turned on. We suggest hitting up some of the hardware review sites for detailed benchmarks, but for those of you that have wanted a Radeon HD 7870 or 7950, this is the card that fits right in-between the two and even beating the Radeon HD 7950 in some games. We've included some graphs from Nvidia showing relative performance compared to some of its other products.
The important thing to keep in mind here is that the GeForce GTX 660 Ti is something of a bargain at $299.99 for the performance it delivers, as it's cheaper than a Radeon HD 7950, yet only marginally more expensive than a Radeon HD 7870. Admittedly it's anything but a bargain basement card, however, as AMD's 7000-series of GPU's don't work in OS X, at least not yet, although we're still holding out some hope that the next iMac will feature an AMD GPU and at $100 less than the GeForce GTX 670, it's currently the card we'd pick if you want to play games in OS X or Windows. Nvidia should be announcing some more affordable models next month, but they'll be based on a slightly different GPU, so we'll have to wait and see what the support in OS X is. At least the GeForce GTX 660 Ti should be a straightforward card to use with your CustoMac.
Source: Nvidia
Relate:
GeForce GTX 660 Ti on Amazon
Reminder: NVIDIA GeForce 6xx Kepler Cards work with GraphicsEnabler=No
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti, GTX 660, GTX 650 Ti and GTS 650 launch dates leak
GeForce GTX 660 Ti pricing revealed
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