14 DAY TRIAL // High-end video cards like the Radeon HD 7970 or NVIDIA's own GeForce GTX 680 boards are all well and good, but they don't sell as much as the adapters populating the lower echelons of the video board industry. Zotac seeks to bank on this by releasing a new GTX 660 Ti.
True, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti is still a powerful adapter, for the upper mainstream market, making it somewhat inaccessible to the masses, price-wise, compared to the GTX 660/650 (non-Ti) and AMD's Radeon HD 7400-7500 series.
Nevertheless, the price of $300 / 300 Euro is much more manageable than $500 / 500 Euro, and the premium added by Zotac's changes shouldn't be too massive, even though the corporation did turn the GTX 660 Ti AMP! Extreme Edition into the “ultimate” model.
“We wanted to build the ultimate GeForce GTX 660 Ti based graphics card. The ZOTAC GeForce GTX 660 Ti AMP! Extreme Edition is the result with its 13-percent performance boost from standard versions,” said Carsten Berger, marketing director, ZOTAC International.
Before we go into the specs, we should probably mention that the original board from NVIDIA, even at 915 MHz GPU clock frequency (980 MHz in GPU Boost) is powerful.
Zotac's ZOTAC GeForce GTX 660 Ti AMP! Extreme Edition runs at 1,098 MHz and 1,176 MHz, respectively.
Meanwhile, the 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM operate at a healthy 6,608 MHz, rather than 6.008 MHz.
Coupled with the 1,344 CUDA cores and an interface of 192 bits, that makes for a very mighty piece of work, even if it isn't technically, part of the top-tier market. It is so mighty, in fact, that it should have an easy time providing video to four monitors and/or HDTVs at once (DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort).
Finally, the newcomer stands out from the flock by virtue of its Dual Silencer Enhanced cooling module, a dual-slot cooler with thick copper heatpipes (three if we are counting them right).