The board, which may or may not be called GTX 660 SE, has larger core count too

Mar 16, 2013 08:42 GMT  ·  By

During the past couple of weeks, we learned about a certain video card that NVIDIA will launch in order to directly oppose one that Advanced Micro Devices is preparing to unveil.

The graphics card that AMD will supposedly release at some point in the near future is called Radeon HD 7790, and will carry the codename Bonaire.

When the first reports about an NVIDIA response came to light, they said the Santa Clara, California-based company was making a new GeForce GTX 650 Ti model.

Later, it was suggested that the board won't be called GeForce GTX 650 Ti, but GeForce GTX 660 SE (second edition).

Now, Bright Side of News said (again) that the name would be GeForce GTX 650 Ti, and even had some specs to share.

For one, it confirmed the number of CUDA cores: 768. This is one thing that wasn't about to change. While clock speeds can be modified, the stream processor count is tricky, only possible to reduce in case a chip isn't flawless.

But we digress. What BSN also said was that the GTX 650 Ti would have the GPU boost technology, meaning that while the base clock speed will be of 980 MHz, the frequency will be able to jump to 1,030 MHz when needed.

For the sake of comparison, the current GeForce GTX 650 Ti has no GPU Boost and works at 925 MHz.

That said, the memory (1 GB or maybe 2 GB) will function at 6 GHz versus the reference 5.4 GHz. Finally, the memory bus is of 192 bits, coupled with the clock, that leads to a bandwidth of 144 GB/s.

It's all enough to make people wonder why NVIDIA doesn't just call the card GTX 655 and be done with it. Prospective buyers will really need to read the specs carefully for however long the older GTX 650 Ti coexists on the market with this one.