GTX 660 and GTX 650

When Nvidia went over all of the details on the GTX 660 and 650 launch with us they started us off with a quote from Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crytek. He was recently quoted saying “This time we promise to melt down PCs” when referring to Crysis 3. Crysis 2 was focused on consoles with PC gaming more of an afterthought. This time around they mean business, focusing on PC gaming first and frankly I think everyone is happy to hear that. Because of the prevalence of console ports a lot of gamers haven’t really needed to upgrade to Direct X 11, meaning its integration has been slow at best as what can be seen in the graph below. Of course, with DX11 cards having been around for going on four years now, those who have held out for four or more years are in need of an upgrade. Those who wait four years to upgrade are looking for a great value to get them a jump in performance without breaking the bank. That is where Nvidia thinks the GTX 660 will fit in. With a MSRP of $229 it won’t break the bank, but they promise performance that will give you your money’s worth.

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Here is how the cards break down and for comparison purposes I have included the corresponding specification listing for the GTX 660Ti to show where the GTX 660 and GTX 650 fit in.

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As you can see the GTX 660 and the GTX 660 Ti are similar in base clock, memory, and memory speed. But where there is a different is in the number of CUDA cores powering everything as well as the TDP. With a relatively small 10 watt drop it was enough to only require one six pin power connection on the GTX 660 where the GTX 660 Ti needed two. The GTX 660 Ti also came with two SLI bridge connections meaning up to quad SLI due to its roots in the GTX 670, the GTX 660 only has the one.

Jumping to the GTX 650 you can see the CUDA cores drop almost two thirds down to 384. The Graphics clock is up there at 1058, but without GPU boost on this model they are able to raise that up slightly. The stock configuration will come with 1GB of GDDR5 but they are also expecting to see 2GB models out as well. Memory speed is a little slower than the GTX 660 as well with the GTX 650 coming in at 5.0 Gbps and the GTX 660 at 6.0 Gbps. TDP is an extremely low 64 watts, but it does still require one six pin connection for power. Here are both of the block diagrams; you can see the differences right away.

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garfi3ld replied the topic: #27952 13 Sep 2012 17:03
The EVGA GTX 660 Superclocked 2Gb

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