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.