Gadgetory

welcome to another Linus tech tips video card launch video so this one is for the geforce gtx 660 from nvidia we're going to be featuring the msi Twin Frozr scheme this is a 2 gig card and it has as you can clearly see their twin frozer 3 cooler so the Twin Frozr 3 cooler has all of the features of a twin froze or four except for one so I'm going to show you guys it's got dual fans of course it has a super pipe thick fat heat pipe keeps the card nice and cool it has okay this is don't do this at home kids okay grounding first of course propeller blade fans so that that the shape as well as that coating on the tips makes it so that it does push more air it's extremely quiet you can see we're running a game right now I'm going to get my okay I was going to have you move the opposite direction I'm going to stop talking I want you to move really close to the card so you can see even running a game it's like inaudible you can't even hear the thing but it's missing the dust removal tech where the fans counter spin the wrong way and and remove some dust from the heatsink before it starts so let's go into some of the details of the GPU itself so this is using a GK 106 core okay this is just the box so there's nothing really that special here GK 106 core it's a kepler based GPU so this is a huge improvement over last generation cards which are based on the Fermi architecture so Kepler adds a whole bunch of stuff besides much better power consumption and better performance Kepler also adds support you know well okay the older cards supported too but innately for TxAA FXAA so these are additional anti-aliasing modes with FXAA being fantastic for lower performance cards but maintaining a certain level of visual quality you've also got full support for adaptive vsync and being a kepler card you also have on the ti excuse of the rather not on the tee on the 660 you've got support for up to four displays out so if you come back here and have a look we've got two DVI ports one HDMI and DisplayPort out which is going to give you three in Nvidia guess around plus-one auxilary display to work with now the 660 only supports two Asli so if you step up to a 660ti you have support for 3-way SLI but the 660 because it's not based on the GK 104 but rather based on the GK 106 core only supports two-way SLI it also has a 192 bit memory bus which is the same as the gtx 660ti and what that means is nvidia is using their unique technology in order to achieve their even memory amount so that's the two gig memory amount versus what you'd normally see with a 192 bit bus which is either 1.5 gigs or 3 gigs so that allows us to hit kind of a sweet spot and this brings me to one of the major points before we get into the performance of the card to much that I want to make versus its last generation contemporary the GTX 560 Ti so these are the more price comparable cards necessarily than the 660ti to the 560 Ti would be so this is a 1 gig card you can buy 2 gig ones but the like the normal one is a 1 gig card and we observe so check this out so in the 660 is getting around 100 FPS is an ultra quality and the elderscrolls whatever it is skyrim around 80 FPS so we're gonna go ahead we're going to all tap out of this game and we saw some crazy results so these results aren't done yet I still have to do some more testing but check this out so the 560 Ti to the 660 is as much as a doubling and performance in and yeah hold on I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to double check these numbers with the ones that I just ran ok so that's a little bit different see this is why I'm rerunning some of the numbers because they just plain didn't look right but check this out so 560 TI on is beaten by more than double by gtx 660 and skyrim so what we're observing here is that the reason NVIDIA has gone with that 2 gig frame buffer is that's the sweet spot right now we're three gigs would potentially cost too much and not provide any additional benefit but a 2 gig frame buffer is going to be more than enough but save you some of the cost on the card so that you get more graphics power for cheaper so we had people suggest actually from our 660ti video review that our 560 TI results were nerfed in some way but that's not true at all what you are seeing is the fact that we are running on modern settings so Crysis 2 is running at very high with the high res texture is enabled Skyrim is running at the ultra preset with the high res texture pack Witcher 2 is running a very high preset with vsync on in Metro 2033 is just a super demanding game in the first place so it shouldn't surprise us that much that these are games that at 1080p with high details are running out of room on that one gig frame buffer so with all that in mind stay tuned for performance alright so here I am in the home studio and I finished all the benchmarking that needs to be done for this card so we've you know I think I already covered enough about the technology itself so here is the test platform and for a change I'm going to take this PowerPoint presentation I'm going to put a link under the video review so you guys can actually download it and check out the graphs at your leisure I'm going to make a habit of doing this in the future guys so this is all run on a core i7 3930k 4 gigahertz cool back course I reach 100 you can read the rest of the specs should you so desire so let's go ahead and switch into play mode first benchmark is Crysis 2 at 1080p at very high settings so something you guys are going to notice again these 560 Ti results they are terrible so we did not see very good results with the 560 Ti at all 660ti absolutely rocks it so by about double the performance and really hangs with its bigger brother the 660ti RSA 6 a CIT 660 hangs with its big brother the 660ti in the 670 which we're both very close I think we get CPU limited once we hit around 95 fps in this particular game the 660 computes very well against its direct competition the 7870 so you see it pretty much a neck-and-neck race here guys and our next benchmark is a battlefield 3 so here we see the GTI 660 performs pretty much again in line with the 7870 edging it out by about you know four percent which is outside the margin of error so we're going to go ahead and call it a victory but again legs behind its bigger brothers which is to be expected next benchmark Skyrim Skyrim was a bit of a little bit of a mess overall just due to the fact that we become very CPU limited once we hit around that 100 FPS mark so it's really hard for any of these cards to pull away from each other however this is still a convincing victory for the 660 but it again loses to its bigger brother and this looked like a bit of an anomaly so not sure what to make of that but don't mind it witcher 2 once again we see the same pattern where these two cards are very competitive with each other however we're going to call that a win for the 7870 and the 660 legs behind the 660ti and thus a 70 which is to be expected because it's cheaper finally metro 2033 see this is the one they're all supposed to be aligned like this so that you can easily compare which cards perform in line with which other cards so here we had these two cards performed very similarly it looks like almost like a memory bandwidth bottleneck because you can see the 670 really pulls away and it doesn't have that 192 memory bus like these two cards both have and they both perform very similarly to the 7870 in this context so thank you for checking out my video review of the msi geforce gtx 660 non TI this is the Twin Frozr Edition card don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from aa unboxings reviews and other computer videos