Yesterday I had the chance to publish my reviews and testing results from two different GTX 660’s one a reference designed card with and overclock from EVGA and the second another overclocked card with a unique thermal solution from MSI. Assuming you took a look at both reviews I’m sure you are very curious if I paired them up and did testing.. Of course I did! I put them through the same collection of tests that I tested the individual cards with. Today we are going to take a quick look at the results and see what just under $460 in GTX 660’s will get you.
Review Samples Provided by: MSI and EVGA
Written by: Wes
Pictures by: Wes
Specifications
EVGA GTX 660 Superclocked
Base Clock |
1046 MHz |
Boost Clock |
1111 MHz |
Memory Clock |
6008 MHz Effective |
CUDA Cores |
960 |
Bus Type |
PCI-E 3.0 |
Memory Detail |
2048MB GDDR5 |
Memory Bit Width |
192 Bit |
Memory Speed |
0.33ns |
Memory Bandwidth |
144.19 GB/s |
Texture Fill Rate |
83.68 GT/s |
Dimensions |
Height: 4.376in |
Accessories |
EVGA Driver/Software Disc |
MSI GTX 660 Twin Frozr 2Gb OC
GPU |
Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 |
CUDA Core |
960 Units |
Core Base Clock |
1033 MHz |
Core Boost Clock |
1098 MHz |
Memory Clock |
6008 MHz |
Memory size |
2048MB GDDR5 |
Memory Bus |
192 bits |
Output |
Displayport HDMI DL-DVI-I DL-DVI-D |
TDP |
150 Watts |
Card Dimensions |
135x125.2x35.8 mm |
DirectX |
11 |
SLI |
2 way |
HDCP |
Yes |
Accessories |
Driver CD Manual Installation Guied 6 Pin Power Cable DVI to VGA Dongle |
3DMark
Running the two cards in SLI gave us amazingly consistent results when compared to the other cards near the top of our charts. The cards paired up gave us a noticeable boost over the two GTX 580’s that we have been using in our motherboard reviews. If you give this some thought, less than a year ago it would cost you almost $1000 for two GTX 580’s and now two cards that cost less than half of that are pulling considerably better numbers.
In Game Benchmarks
In game results are much of the same with the pair of GTX 660’s outperforming the GTX 580’s. As far as actual numbers go, our Battlefield 3 results show a whopping 108.267. Considering we saw 57 FPS for each card previously, we actually are seeing 94% of the performance. They scale in SLI near perfectly meaning there is very little lost performance for going with a second card.
Final Thoughts
Although we just briefly covered all of the results, it’s clear right away that the GTX 660’s when paired up can dominate. When compared to the GTX 680, you are going to see a major boost in performance over the single card. This is made very impressive when you consider that two GTX 660’s will cost you $460 and one GTX 680 is running at the same price after rebate. I’m not suggesting that the GTX 660’s is a better option for everyone. Personally I would prefer to have the option to be able to add a second card later, but it is an interesting option if you are looking for even more performance than the GTX 680 without spending any more money. I have a feeling we will see a few GTX 660’s at our next LAN with most of those people planning on picking up a second card in the future.