Asus GeForce GTX 660 Ti DirectCU II TOP review

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.