14 DAY TRIAL // We said that NVIDIA was going to release its two new GeForce 600 series graphics cars today and, sure enough, the GTX 660 and 650 are finally out and ready to be bought, after having already been benchmarked.
The GeForrce GTX 650 is the weaker of the two, and it has a significantly different design from most GTX boards, with a wide PCB and no cooler shroud.
Even so, its specifications are good enough for both media and games. The GK107 GPU offers 384 CUDA cores, 32 TMUs, 16 ROPs and a memory interface of 128 bits for the 1 GB of GDDR5 VRAM
Speaking of which, the memory operates at 5 GHz, while the GPU runs at a clock speed of 1,058 MHz (no GPU Boost technology here).
All games, even the latest DirectX 11 titles, should run smoothly at full graphics settings, provided the resolution isn't set higher than HD (1366 x 768 pixels). Not to say that higher resolutions won't work. Some titles, especially NVIDIA-optimized ones, should be fine, but there is no guarantee that frame rates won't drop to troublesome levels.
The other graphics card, GeForce GTX 660, has the GK106 GPU, with 960 CUDA cores, 80 TMUs, 24 ROPs and an interface of 192 bits. It should run even Full HD easily.
The memory amount is twice as high compared to GTX 650 (2 GB) and the clock speeds are of 980 MHz for the GPU (1,033 MHz GPU Boost) and 6 GHz for the memory. 2-way SLI capability is available as well.
Both adapters support the PCI Express 3.0 interface and will be up for sale shortly, if they haven't already.
The GTX 650 bears a price of $150 in the US. That would correspond to 116 Euro in Europe if exchange rates had any bearing. Since they don't, the odds are higher for 150 Euro to be the real price on the old continent.
That goes for the GeForce GTX 660 unit as well. Since it ships for $229 in the US, its European price probably hovers around 200-229 Euro, not 177 Euro. Stay tuned for custom models from NVIDIA's many partners.
