Gigabyte GTX 660 OC Video Card Review

Video cards with a factory overclock are good for any gamer since they can offer you better performance with only a minor price premium, overclocking them beyond this is just money in your pocket, and kinda fun.

Overclocking the Kepler is a little different than what we have done in the past.  There are no shader controls and you now have to deal with the non-adjustable Boost Clock.  By adjusting the power slider you can control how much boost is applied but ti will also limit your overall overclock.  For these tests we were limited to a mild overclock of 1073Mhz Core and 1602Mhz Memory with a boost clock ramping things up to 1138Mhz.

During our benchmarking runs we left Afterburner running so we could monitor temps and core usage.  After several runs we go back and look at the stats under load.  The total boost under load was right around what GPUz reported at 1150Mhz. 

At only 50Mhz+ we cannot expect much in terms of a big performance gain.  Both 3DMark benchmarks showed minor gains and Crysis 2 leveled out at +2FPS on average.  This is not what we like to see from an overclock but that was all the card would do and still remain stable.

It is hard to say if our overclocking issues were related to heat since Afterburner only reported a 54c load temp during the crash but we can say that anything above 1073Mhz would fail the longer Vantage benchmarks.  Considering that the Gigabyte GTX 660 is already factory overclocked, and the target market, we don't suspect many users will be overclocking of this card but rather pulling the SLI option  and installing a secondary GPU.

Keep in mind that overclocking is not guaranteed so your results may vary.