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The launch schedule rumours of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 660 and 650 cards have been a bit back and forth, but now the company has finally announced both of the new models. Price wise these should be appealing as good CustoMac options, especially as the GTX 650 is pretty much a faster version of the GT 650M that Apple uses in the retina MacBook Pro.We've already written a lot about these two cards, but we'll recap the important bits here. The GTX 650 is as mentioned based on the same GPU – known as the GK107 – as the GeForce GT 650M and of course the current GeForce GT 640. The big difference compared to the GT 640 is a move to GDDR5 memory and slightly higher clock speeds. Interestingly, despite having a maximum graphics card power draw of 1W less than the GT 640, Nvidia has added a 6-pin power connector to the GTX 650, most likely to attract users that want to overclock their cards.
In actual figures, the GTX 640 is 158MHz faster than the GT 640 at 1058MHz which offers an improved texture fill rate of 33.9 billion textures per second, compared to 28.8 billion textures per second. The memory clock speed has increased from an effective clock speed of 1.8GHz to 5GHz and as such the memory bandwidth has increased from a mere 28.5GB/s to 80GB/s, a significant jump which should be noticeable in any application or game that is using a lot of memory bandwidth.
Moving on to the GeForce GTX 660, we're looking at a "new" GPU in the shape of the GK106 which well be the base for Nvidia's mid-range cards. We're expecting at least one or two more models based on the GK106 to fill up the gap between the GTX 660 and the GTX 650. The GTX 660 is clearly a feature cut version, as it only has 960 CUDA cores/shaders, compared to 1344 for the GTX 660 Ti. It does have a higher GPU clock of 980MHz, compared to 915MHz and its boost clock goes all the way up to 1033MHz, compared to 980MHz. Even so, the texture fill rate – which is the only performance indication Nvidia supplies – is down to 78.4 billion textures per second compared to 102.5 billion textures per second.Most features are otherwise remaining the same and the GTX 660 comes with 2GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 6GHz on a 192-bit bus. The only slight change is 10W lower maximum power draw and a single 6-pin power connector on the reference cards, suggesting a more limited overclocking potential for these cards compared to the GTX 660 Ti, for those that are interested in pushing the limit of their cards.
Nvidia's selling point for the new cards is to push people to DirectX 11, as they're unhappy that so many users are still stuck using old graphics cards. According to the performance comparison graph you can see above, you'll notice that even the GTX 650 beats many older cards that were considered to be higher-end parts when they launched a few years ago. In fact, the GTX 650 is meant to beat the GTX 260 which would've retailed at 2-3 times the price of the GTX 650 when it launched back in 2009 and of course would use 3-4 times as much power. Who said progress is a bad thing?
Price wise both of the new cards are pretty attractive, as the GTX 650 has an MSRP of a mere $109, which is barely any more expensive that what most GT 640 cards are retailing for – rebates not being taken into consideration – which suggests that we might see a general price drop for the GT 640 in the near future. The GTX 660 starts at $229, although we'd expect at least a few more expensive partner cards here, especially as pre-overclocked versions start to appear in retail. Sadly, we were unable to find either of the two new cards on sale as yet, but we'll bring you more news once these cards appear for sale.
Source: Nvidia
Related:
GeForce GTX 660 and GTX 650 announcement next week
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti, GTX 660, GTX 650 Ti and GTS 650 launch dates leak
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti Launches Today
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