Multiple Contenders – EVGA SC

We take overclocked 660 Ti card from EVGA, Galaxy, MSI and Zotac and put them head to head.

One of the most anticipated graphics card releases of the year occurred this month in the form of the GeForce GTX 660 Ti from NVIDIA, and as you would expect we were there on the day one with an in-depth review of the card at reference speeds.

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti is based on GK104, and what you might find interesting is that it is nearly identical to the specifications of the GTX 670. Both utilize 7 SMX units for a total of 1344 stream processors – or CUDA cores – and both run at a reference clock speed of 915 MHz base and 980 MHz Boost. Both include 112 texture units though the GeForce GTX 660 Ti does see a drop in ROP count from 32 to 24. Also, L2 cache drops from 512KB to 384KB along with a memory bus width drop from 256-bit to 192-bit.

We already spent quite a lot of time talking about the GTX 660 Ti compared to the other NVIDIA and AMD GPUs in the market in our review (linked above) as well as on our most recent episode of the PC Perspective Podcast. Today's story is all about the retail cards we received from various vendors including EVGA, Galaxy, MSI and Zotac. We are going to show you each card's design, the higher clocked settings that were implemented, performance differences between them and finally the overclocking comparisons of all four.

EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti Superclocked

Our first retail GeForce GTX 660 Ti card (in alphabetical order of course) is the EVGA Superclocked variant – a design that EVGA fans will no doubt be very familiar with.

The card includes the standard set of features and 2GB of frame buffer, and uses as close to a "reference" cooler as any of the cards in our roundup today.

EVGA's card has a unique texture on the carbon fiber styled front panel that is "tacky" without being sticky. It looks very nice though in our office it did gather some dust as it was moved around for testing and photos.

EVGA's model uses the half-length PCB that we first saw introduced on the GTX 670 reference cards. Because this GPU shares so much DNA with the GTX 670, it makes sense that these same designs would be common.

The standard connection configuration is at work here with two dual-link DVI ports and full-size HDMI and DisplayPort outputs. I really do think this is the best hassle-free configuration I have seen on a graphics card to date.

While all four of these graphics cards had the same kind of standard pack-ins – like DVI to VGA adapter, power adapters, etc – EVGA included a pretty neat set of stickers. While I usually just pass this stuff straight to the garbage can, I think much of the community relates to the pride associated with building your own rig and these stickers expound on that.

The EVGA Superclocked 660 Ti runs at a 980 MHz base clock with a 1059 MHz Boost clock. While that is higher than the reference speeds of 915 MHz base and 985 MHz boost, it is the lowest of all the "out of the box" clocks for the four cards we are testing here.