Gigabyte GTX 660Ti OC Video Card Review

The Gigabyte GV-N66TOC-GD2 has many things going for it starting with the new GTX 660Ti GPU.  This may be a revised version of the GTX 670 but it has plenty of power for most games and can clearly give the Radeon HD7970 a run for its money.  Most of that power comes from the impressive factory overclock that helps offset the 192-bit memory controller.
 
During our testing the Gigabyte GTX 660Ti ran extremely well and posted some good results at even the massive 2560x1600 screen resolution.  NVidia has positioned this card to complete against the Radeon HD7870 in price and performance and Gigabyte claims that with the factory overclock there is a slight performance advantage over the Radeon HD 7970.  We have determined that while this might be the case in synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark 11 those performance gains it didn't translate exactly to our gaming tests.

Overclocking is a big part of the enthusiast community so we tend to look for special card designs that help us overclock without having to resort to extensive board modifications and insane cooling solutions.  The Gigabyte GTX 660 Ti fits that profile by offering us the large dual fan Windforce thermal solution and factory overclock.  During our tests we were able to clock the card up to 1103Mhz with an actual boost clock of 1311Mhz!  Our attempts to make this card run faster were met with heat related instabilities.

Of course for those who would prefer not to overclock their video cards there is another way to get more performance from the GTX 660 Ti using SLI technology.  Typically the x60 generation was limited to dual card SLI but with the GTX 660 Ti the prospect of 3-way configurations has become a reality and supported out of the box.

Windforce Cooler
Quiet Cooling
Compact PCB Design
6-Phase PWM
Factory Overclocked
1300Mhz Boost Clock (under overclocking)

Quiet cooler not good for extreme overclocks