PNY GeForce GTX 660 Ti review

Last month we saw the first card based on Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 660 Ti chipset – the Asus GeForce GTX 660 Ti DirectCU II TOP. That graphics card performed very strongly in our benchmarks, and in many tests was even faster than the model above in Nvidia’s range – the GTX 670 – thanks to its 79MHz core overclock.

However, the Asus card is expensive – you pay around £25 for that overclock compared to a standard GTX 660 Ti. For this reason we were keen to look at a card running at Nvidia’s reference speeds, and PNY’s GeForce GTX 660 Ti is the first to arrive. The stock card has 1,344 CUDA cores and a core clock speed of 915MHz, boosting to 980MHz when required. It also has 2GB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1.5GHz and a 192-bit memory bus.

Unlike Asus’s card, which has a huge twin-fan cooler, the PNY model has a standard single-fan heatsink. It’s slightly louder than the Asus TOP, but not so much as to bother you. On the rear are two DVI ports, HDMI and a full-size DisplayPort connector, and you’ll need a power supply with two six-pin PCI Express connectors.

Even running at its stock speeds, our benchmarks showed the GTX 660 Ti to be an impressive card. In our 1,920×1,080 Ultra quality Dirt 3 test, we saw 97.5fps, which is not far off the 102.1fps of the overclocked Asus card and the 98.5fps of the £305 GTX 670. When we ran Dirt 3 on three monitors in Surround mode, with a total resolution of 5,760×1,080 and Ultra detail, we saw a smooth 40.7fps and a minimum frame rate of 34.6fps from PNY’s GTX 660 Ti, showing the game was playable at all times and only a couple of frames per second slower than the more expensive cards.

Crysis 2 is a significantly more challenging graphics test, but even here the GTX 660 Ti could keep up with the more expensive Nvidia cards; an average of 40.6fps at 1,920×1,080 and Ultra detail levels puts it less than 1fps behind the GTX 670 and Asus’s overclocked GTX 660 Ti TOP.

When we tested Asus’s GTX 660 Ti TOP we thought that it made the more expensive GTX 670 redundant, as it could almost match it for performance while being significantly cheaper. However, the Asus card is also in danger of being made look bad by PNY’s stock version. PNY’s card comes close enough in our games tests as to make no real difference to gameplay.

OVERCLOCKING

The GTX 660 Ti’s predecessor, the GTX 560 Ti, was an overclockable card, so we were keen to see how much we could boost the performance of the new version. Using MSI’s Afterburner utility, we pushed the core clock up by 79MHz, which is the same overclock we saw on Asus’s TOP version of the GTX 660 Ti. At first this overclock wasn’t stable, but once we raised the maximum voltage ceiling to 120% the card could run all our tests.

The overclock had just the result we expected, and brought the card up to the speed of Asus’s GTX 660 Ti TOP, with a huge 102.1fps in Dirt 3, 42.2fps in Crysis 2 and 44.9fps in Dirt 3 on three monitors at 5,760×1,080. The card wasn’t as quiet as the Asus TOP with its huge heatsink at this speed, but it still wasn’t loud enough to annoy us. It also didn’t get very hot, even when we ran our benchmarks on loop for half an hour to check stability.

Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 660 Ti chipset continues to impress us, with better performance than its AMD rivals and frame rates in games that are very close to Nvidia’s more expensive cards. We’re particularly impressed with PNY’s stock version, as it’s still very quick at standard speeds but has the overclocking headroom to add a useful 5% frames per second speed boost in games. There’s a lot of power here for £240 – it’s a Best Buy.