Posted by Chris Scott Barr on Sep 13, 2012

It’s been less than a month since Nvidia launched the GTX 660, finally bringing Kepler into the sub-$300 price bracket. With four months between the last two card launches, I’m happy to see the new GTX 660 hitting store shelves today. These cards start at $229, making them accessible to more budget-conscious builders. They have also released the GTX 650 at a price point of $109, however, today we’ll be focusing on the 660.

This card doesn’t quite get us down to the $200 limit, but the retail price is almost on par with AMD’s 7850, which is an area that Nvidia has been lacking for some time. As you can see from the chart below, there is a considerable drop in stream processors and ROP units. However, it does feature a slightly higher base clock than the Ti, and even the 670.

Nvidia is specifically targeting this card at people who play on monitors at 1080p, and they claim that the card will play the vast majority of games on high (if not the highest) settings. We’ll look into that more here in a bit.