Asus GeForce GTX 660 Ti DirectCU II TOP review

Nvidia’s 28nm “Kepler” architecture has produced some impressive high-end graphics cards, such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 680. Both those cards cost more than £300, though, which will put them out of reach of all but the most hardcore enthusiasts.

With that in mind, we’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of the follow-up to one of last year’s best enthusiast graphics cards – the Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti. The GTX 660 Ti is now here, and it has a very similar specification to the model above, the GTX 670. Both cards have 1,344 CUDA cores and a stock core speed of 915MHz, boosting to a maximum of 980MHz when the thermal envelope allows. Both cards also have 2GB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1.5GHz – the chief difference between the cards is that the GTX 660 Ti has a 192-bit memory interface, compared to the 256-bit interface of the GTX 670.

Rather than a card with Nvidia’s reference specifications, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti card we have for review is an Asus TOP model with a big twin-fan heatsink, and its graphics core has a maximum boost of 1,059GHz – 79MHz more than the stock card.

It’s a quiet card which needs two six-pin PCI Express power connectors. On the rear are two DVI ports, one of which can be used with a DVI to VGA adaptor, an HDMI port and a full-size DisplayPort connector. Any three of these can be used for triple-monitor gaming in Nvidia’s Surround mode.

In our gaming tests, the overclocked GTX 660 Ti exceeded our expectations. In Dirt 3 at 1,920×1,080 with 4x anti-aliasing and Ultra detail, we saw 102.1fps – quicker than the GTX 670’s 98.5fps. In Crysis 2 at 1,920×1,080, Ultra detail and with the high-definition texture pack installed, the card still managed 43.2fps, compared to 41.2fps from the GTX 670. When we switched to three monitors in Dirt 3 for a total resolution of 5,760×1,080, the GTX 660 Ti gave a frame rate of 43.2fps – again, slightly more than the GTX 670’s 41.9fps.

The fact that Asus’s overclocked GTX 660 Ti is quicker than the GTX 670, which is £25 more, shows it to be an impressive and good-value card. It is around £30 more expensive than Nvidia’s RRP for the standard GTX 660 Ti, though. To see how cards based on Nvidia’s stock specifications would perform, we underclocked the GTX 660 Ti to 800MHz.

This made some difference in our benchmarks, but not a huge amount. In our single-monitor Dirt 3 test, the underclocked card managed 94.3fps – an 8% reduction. In our challenging Crysis 2 test, the difference was smaller; when running at 800MHz the GTX 660 Ti could run the benchmark at 41.5fps, which is just 2% slower than the overclocked card. In Dirt 3 in three-monitor surround mode, we saw 41.1fps from the underclocked card, which is just 5% slower.

This also means that the GTX 660 Ti is nearly as quick as the GTX 670, even when running at stock speeds – there’s only 2-4% difference between the cards in all our game tests. Considering the stock GTX 660 Ti is around £55 cheaper than the GTX 670, it effectively makes the more expensive card redundant. It’s also a couple of percent quicker than AMD’s Radeon HD 7950, even with the AMD card’s new BIOS update (see below).

Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 660 Ti is everything we hoped it would be – it’s the best enthusiast graphics card available, just pipping the AMD Radeon HD 7950 to the post, even after the HD 7950’s latest updates. The overclocked Asus TOP version is a beautifully-made card with a very quiet cooler, but we can’t see the extra cost is worth the small performance increase. The stock GeForce GTX 660 Ti, though, is a Best Buy.