ZOTAC GeForce GTX 660 Ti AMP! Edition Pro Reviews

Bringing the review to a close, it should come as no surprise that the launch of the GTX 660 Ti has ended up being a lot like the launches before it. Yet at the same time it’s not truly identical, as there’s a lot going on that makes it nothing like the launches before it. Distilled to its essence, the GTX 660 Ti is yet another fine addition to the GTX 600 series thanks to the GK104 GPU. Compared to the GTX 670 it’s a bit slower, a lot cheaper, and still brutally efficient. For buyers who have wanted to pick up a Kepler card but have found the high-end GTX 670 and GTX 680 out of their price range, at $300 the GTX 660 Ti is at a much more approachable point on the price-performance curve, offering about 88% of the GTX 670’s performance for 75% of the price. Given the price of Kepler cards so far this is definitely a better deal, though it’s still by no means cheap. So in that respect the launch of the GTX 660 Ti is quite a lot like the launches before it. What’s different about this launch compared to the launches before it is that AMD was finally prepared; this isn’t going to be another NVIDIA blow-out. While the GTX 680 marginalized the Radeon HD 7970 virtually overnight, and then the GTX 670 did the same thing to the Radeon HD 7950, the same will not be happening to AMD with the GTX 660 Ti. AMD has already bracketed the GTX 660 Ti by positioning the 7870 below it and the 7950 above it, putting them in a good position to fend off NVIDIA.

Of the four GeForce GTX 660 Ti cards we looked at, it’s difficult to point to a clear winner. Each card performed well and remained quiet throughout testing. We really like MSI’s GeForce GTX 660 Ti Power Edition due to its competitive price and excellent cooler and we have to give ZOTAC props for including a game coupon with their card, clocking it the highest, and keeping its form factor as svelte as possible. Gigabyte’s card ran the coolest, however, and EVGA offers the best warranty coverage, so each card stands out in one way or another. Ultimately though, we think anyone looking for a graphics card in the $300 price range would be well served by the GeForce GTX 600 Ti. NVIDIA’s got another winner on their hands and continues to push the price/performance envelope with Kepler.

As it's currently priced, the Zotac GTX 660 Ti 2GB amp! Extreme is actually good value compared to other board partners' cards of the same GPU. It's at least £20 cheaper than the regular and slower amp! Edition for some reason, and comes in at roughly the middle of the price range for GTX 660 Ti 2GB cards, but offers clock frequencies that are almost as high as the GPU will go in a package that is small, cool and quiet. Whether or not the price will remain at this price for long is hard to say, but the majority of e-tailers are selling the card closer to the £270 mark. Just as with the original amp! Edition, however, the biggest thorn in the side of this card is still its bigger brother, the GTX 670 2GB. As we've said before, this card currently offers some of the best value in the graphics market, and can be found now for around £275, with some even coming on pre-order for less than £265. Therefore, for just £25 more, you can net yourself a card that is better performing and, thanks to its additional memory controller, also more future proof, especially for those with an eye for a monitor upgrade. The amp! Extreme is a great card, but it takes the GTX 660 Ti GPU close to its limits while still being consistently outperformed by the GTX 670 2GB at stock speeds. Our advice for those considering the upgrade is therefore to save up some Christmas cash and nab the costlier card, which has more juice to give and will benefit you more in the long run.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti is a great GPU, and as such we found all four of these retails cards to be worthy of purchases. If you already bought one and it's on the way you really don't need to worry about any kind of returns. You'll be happy with the performance. That being said, the Zotac AMP! Edition gets my nod as the best of the bunch with its higher GPU clock speeds, and overclocked memory speeds resulting in an out-of-box experience that is a little better than the rest. Both Galaxy and MSI GTX 660 Ti cards offer outstanding cooling with low noise levels, and should be overclockable to the same settings as the Zotac card if you are willing to do it manually. EVGA's $309 version just feels a bit lacking with the "stock" cooler, higher temps and low overclocked settings. Still, EVGA is known to have one of the best communities and support groups (and warranties) in the graphics card world, not to mention supporting the gaming world with Precision X.

NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 660 Ti will be a hit of that I am sure. The card delivers excellent performance levels at reasonable power consumption, which enables board partners to create low-noise custom designs. The new GTX 660 Ti is almost twice as fast as the last-generation GTX 560 Ti, but comes at a $50 higher introductory cost. ZOTAC's GTX 660 Ti uses the (short) NVIDIA reference PCB and pairs it with a custom dual fan cooler that matches the PCB's length. This makes the card very short, which will be a blessing for many users with smaller cases - especially ITX builds come to mind. The card does not look cheap or weak in any way despite being compact. I would classify its visual appearance as "cute in a good way". Thanks to the overclock out of the box, the card achieves a 6% performance improvement over the reference design. This makes the card just 7% slower than GTX 670 and 6% faster than AMD's HD 7950, which is more expensive. ZOTAC's card is also the only one we tested today that comes with a 150 MHz memory overclock out of the box.

The GTX 660 Ti was released with many models and almost all of them extended PCB’s with custom VRM and all kinds of gadgets and bells and whistles. After all of it was said and done ZOTAC pulled some magic pixie dust out of their hat with some amazing numbers. All things considered the ZOTAC card pulled the highest dynamic boost clock numbers by 25MHz which means they have some background trickery going on. The card is small which means guess what people all of those looking to make a smaller system or a LAN box rig could easily fit this card in there for some awesome gaming performance. There is a strange stigma around SFF cards, that they are cheap or underperformers, but the rulebook of perception has just been rewritten. ZOTAC has made the mini-card not just legitimate but a downright killer, and one hell of a performer. Out of the box the card is clocked for memory 600MHz QDR: higher than any other 660 Ti we received The only real issue we have with the card would be the slightly higher price, but as we said before, if the card has features we would pay a little extra for it. While the card on the surface may seem simple, its overclocking ability makes it a steal.

Although it's not a top performer in every game, the Zotac GeForce GTX 660 Ti AMP! Edition makes excellent use of Nvidia’s latest upper-midrange GPU.