NVidia GTX 660Ti SLI Performance and Overclocking
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Conclusion
SLI is a pretty cool technology that helps extend the life of your gaming system but it doesn't come without a few issues. This biggest of these is money. For the cost of two GTX 660Ti video cards you could have bought a single GTX 680. Will you get the same performance? According to HWBot the answer is no but in real world games you may never notice.
On the positive side SLI is perfect for the gamer on a budget. As we know building a computer can be an expensive prospect and you may not be able to afford the GTX 680 right away but can easily purchase a GTX 660Ti. Provided you purchase the hardware required to support SLI (Motherboard, PSU, etc..) adding a secondary GTX 660Ti is an easy upgrade that can double your gaming performance.
For this article we used two factory overclocked GTX 660Ti video cards that run great out of the box. Both of the cards overclocked quite well but the larger cooler and enhanced board design enabled the MSI GTX 660Ti to run a little better. Sadly during our overclocking tests the Gigabyte card was starved for air and required some help to remain stable.
Overclocking isn't for everyone but in the hands of a skilled overclocker you can get some really good performance numbers from a GTX 660Ti in SLI. (That almost rhymes). During our overclocking tests we cranked the CPU up to 4.6Ghz and ran both video cards with a 1120Mhz core clock. You could easily see a performance boost in 3Dmark Vantage and 3Dmark 11 but the added power didn't translate well to Crysis 2. The same thing can be seen in the individual video card reviews telling us that for that for this particular game (and others) adding a second graphics card was clearly the best solution.
On the positive side SLI is perfect for the gamer on a budget. As we know building a computer can be an expensive prospect and you may not be able to afford the GTX 680 right away but can easily purchase a GTX 660Ti. Provided you purchase the hardware required to support SLI (Motherboard, PSU, etc..) adding a secondary GTX 660Ti is an easy upgrade that can double your gaming performance.
For this article we used two factory overclocked GTX 660Ti video cards that run great out of the box. Both of the cards overclocked quite well but the larger cooler and enhanced board design enabled the MSI GTX 660Ti to run a little better. Sadly during our overclocking tests the Gigabyte card was starved for air and required some help to remain stable.
Overclocking isn't for everyone but in the hands of a skilled overclocker you can get some really good performance numbers from a GTX 660Ti in SLI. (That almost rhymes). During our overclocking tests we cranked the CPU up to 4.6Ghz and ran both video cards with a 1120Mhz core clock. You could easily see a performance boost in 3Dmark Vantage and 3Dmark 11 but the added power didn't translate well to Crysis 2. The same thing can be seen in the individual video card reviews telling us that for that for this particular game (and others) adding a second graphics card was clearly the best solution.
