Review: KFA² GeForce GTX 660 Ti EX OC 3GB

Final thoughts and rating

GeForce GTX 660 Ti, launched today, brings NVIDIA's potent Kepler GK104 graphics architecture down to £240 for the first time. NVIDIA harnesses much of the pure grunt found in the £300 GeForce GTX 670 yet reduces performance by hobbling the GPU's memory bandwidth, which is important when image quality and resolution are turned all the way to 11.

NVIDIA's pricing and performance segmentation strategy leads to the GTX 660 Ti being 20 per cent slower than the GTX 670 in real-world games, fitting in reasonably well with its lower street price. GeForce GTX 660 Ti, then, is a solid GPU based on proven technology.

But rival AMD hasn't stood still while NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 600-series have been making hay. Handsome price reductions and driver-related performance optimisations ensure that comparable Radeons - HD 7870 and HD 7950 - offer a genuine, honest-to-goodness alternative, and our nine benchmark titles show no clear overall winner at around the £250 mark; performance is fundamentally title-specific though skewed more towards the Radeons than the GTX 660 Ti.

Given the impressive array of GPU talent present in the £200-£300 space and obvious potential for mass-market appeal, we feel as if vanilla GTX 660 Tis need to be available for closer to £200 for them to really stand out, leaving partners enough room to launch custom-cooled models at comfortably below GTX 670 prices.

Moving nicely on to a card that you can actually purchase, KFA² has used a meaty, albeit quiet, cooler, decent out-of-the-box frequencies and a 3GB framebuffer to construct the premium GeForce GTX 660 Ti EX OC. Tentatively priced at £280 and performing some 20 per cent lower than the aforementioned GTX 670, mainly due to memory-bandwidth limitations, we reckon the firm needs to drop UK pricing by at least £30 for it to make sense. Ultimately, then, the KFA² GTX 660 Ti EX OC 3GB card is innately good yet UK pricing is off.

The Good

GTX 660 Ti brings proper Kepler goodness to a lower price point
KFA² GTX 660 Ti EX OC is cool and quiet
Overclocks very well
Borderlands 2 for free

The Bad

HEXUS Rating

KFA² GeForce GTX 660 Ti EX OC 3GB

HEXUS Where2Buy

The KFA² GeForce GTX 660 Ti EX OC 3GB graphics card is available to purchase from Overclockers UK.

HEXUS Right2Reply

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