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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti Launches Today

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gtx_660ti.jpgIf 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.

GTX660Ti_block_diagram.jpg
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.

gtx_660ti_ports.jpg
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.

gtx660ti_performance.png
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.

nvidia_performance.png
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

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i am totally upgrading to this today or tomorrow
 
Great facts, really helps further understand the difference. Rather than just choosing by price.
 
Article: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti Launches Today

Do you think there will be an issue if i get a 3gb ram card vs the 2gb for osx compatibility? Anyone have a recomended brand?
 
Article: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti Launches Today

Do you think there will be an issue if i get a 3gb ram card vs the 2gb for osx compatibility? Anyone have a recomended brand?

Have you seen a 3GB card available yet?
They all seem to be up for pre-order only atom.
I doubt it'll have much of an affect on compatibility though, but who knows.
 
For people like me looking to make a compact build, this could be a great choice. It seems to have a high perforance-to-wattage ratio, and it edges out last year's GTX 580 while being 40% cheaper. Plus the power requirements pair well with the new Silverstone 450W SFX PSU mentioned in a previous post.
 
From personal experience, which company generally makes the QUIETEST discrete video cards? Thanks in advance.
 
Article: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti Launches Today

Have you seen a 3GB RAM card?

KFA2 GeForce GTX 660TI EX OC 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card [66NNH7DV6WXZ]
 
Where is the pricing on the GTX 660 expected to land when it's released?
 
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