Gadgetory

more than anything else this video is an overview of the overclocking prowess and value of the gtx 660ti power edition from msi so that's the part number right there basically if you're shopping for a gtx 660ti that is the one you want and I'm about to show you why because what's cool about video card reviews is they tell you all kinds of performance numbers and benchmarks and metrics and I go yeah like this card firms like really good this one performs really like not quite as good and you know this one is better than both of them like those those kinds of those kinds of things are interesting and then what they often do I often often do is they take the card that's being reviewed and they overclock it and then they put it back onto the graph and compare it against all the other cards well I'm not doing that what I'm gonna be doing is I'm gonna be delivering no stock results for any of the cards in this comparison I will be delivering only overclock results so the ones that are gonna be in my comparison aren't going to be the what the heck is this alright Radeon HD 7870 Hawke okay sapphire HD 7950 so this is a reference PCB but with an aftermarket cooler okay so these are the two radio on cards on either side of the 660ti pricing wise I'm gonna have a reference GTX 670 I'm going to have an on reference but non triple over voltage gtx 660ti and then i'm going to have the 660ti power Edition from MSI now what's cool about this comparison is that kepler video cards that is anything that's not a power Edition or a lightning there's a lightning over there somewhere Lightning anything that's not one of those does not support over volting on the GPU so even if you use an overclocking utility like MSI after burner you will not get any support for overruling the graphics core so what that means is your overclocking will be limited right off the bat so I was really interested to find out what's better an msi power Edition or a $100 or will $90 more video card a GTX 670 without over voltage support so first I want to go through what kind of clock speeds we were able to obtain so the most important ones are the 660 the two 660 t is so we've got the galaxy g GC clock which we were able to get an additional 90 here it's on the core another hundred ninety Hertz 90 megahertz on the core 100 megahertz on the memory and we have the fan pinned at 80% and then on the on the 660 power Edition we maxed out the voltages in the power limit just because we were doing a quick and dirty overclock I'm not necessarily recommending that for 24/7 use but we've got 200 megahertz on the core 400 megahertz on the RAM which really goes a long way to making up for the narrower memory bus compared to a GTX 670 and we got the AMIA defense being pinned at a hundred percent nominal so let's take a look at some performance numbers here so let's start with Crysis 2 the first thing that we notice about this game or while this benchmark is that the 7950 is a beast overclocker and when you compare that to something like the max overclock you can get out of the GTX 670 reference card which is fairly close to the start clock well that's very interesting isn't it because the 7950 is slower to start with but actually they become neck and freakin neck as soon as you overclock them with the 7950 edging out the 670 in our test the other interesting thing is check out the 660ti power Edition which by the way is almost $100 cheaper than a 670 referenced but minimum FPS are right there maximum FPS are right in there we're talking 5 percent slower our destiny maximum what I meant to say was average and it definitely beats out the non triple overvoltage capable card when it is also maximum overclocked on the 7870 is just not even not even the running your folks sorry I was letting that camera turn it drifted I did that if you want my Skyrim bench really favors the in video cards and you can see again here even though the AMD cards put up a good showing even you know especially when they're overclocked this looks like a bit of an anomaly here the 660ti power edition or gets really close to that 670 reference once they're both maximum off remember the 660ti power Edition started out significantly slower than a 670 and then it just blows away in terms of minimum fps especially so you can see that it's possible that we are memory bandwidth limited here remember that power Edition card because of its capability of overruling the GPU the memory and the PLL was able to get a 4x overclock on the memory versus what we were able to do on the the non triple overvoltage capable 660ti and again we see the overclocking capability of the 7950 really shine through I think if we had a GTX 670 that was capable of over a full ting the GPU core such as like an msi power Edition of that one that we might see a much closer race here you might be able to squeeze another 10% or another 12% performance out of that 670 and you can see this time 660ti doesn't make up as much head room are as much ground on the 670 but the maximum overclock of the power Edition versus the non power Edition again helped it to achieve 10% more on minimum fps and about 10% more on average FPS so if you're gonna spend an extra 10 bucks on a $300 card which basically amounts to 3% you might as well get 10% extra performance so thank you for checking out this little analysis of the performance of the power Edition versus a non power Edition and bear in mind guys I know this is an extremely small cross-section of titles but given that we're comparing two identical architectured cards we are looking at real world performance gains to be had from the extra overclocking Headroom on the msi power edition so thank you for checking out this video don't forget to subscribe - tech tips from ron boxing's reviews and Computers