MSI N660 Twin Frozr III 2GD5 Pro Reviews

In the end, the new GeForce GTX 660 is another strong product in its category, from NVIDIA. The GPU offers great performance in its segment, it's relatively quiet, power consumption is in-line and the GeForce GTX 660 is priced competitively. You can't ask for much more than that.

NVIDIA's new GTX 660 adds to the company's product stack by providing a fully featured gaming solution at the crucial price point of around $200. In terms of performance, the reference design sits right between AMD's HD 7850 and HD 7870. MSI has put an overclock out of the box on their TwinFrozr III board that helps the card gain 5% over the NVIDIA GTX 660 reference design, which is still 2% behind the reference HD 7870. Just like on the GTX 660 Ti, we see MSI's card deliver more performance at the same clock frequency than any other GTX 660 card from other manufacturers. MSI's special tweaking also shows in our overclocking results. Here, the MSI card delivers the highest overclocked performance despite reaching lower clock speeds. Overall gaming performance of the MSI GTX 660 Twin Frozr is enough for most titles at full HD with maximum details and anti-aliasing. Compared to the GK104 based cards like GTX 680, 670 and 660 Ti, the new GK106 graphics processor offers significantly improved non-gaming power draw that beats anything similar AMD has to offer, especially when running multiple monitors or Blu-ray. HD 7800 is the winner when it comes to gaming power consumption despite NVIDIA having the better boost clock technology to improve performance per Watt. AMD also has ZeroCore power, which turns the card off while the screen is off during, for example, overnight download sessions.

The MSI GeForce GTX 660 Twin Frozr OC Edition is a great example of what an extra $10 will get you over the GeForce GTX 660 reference design (EVGA also offers a step up for $10). With the MSI product line an extra $10 gets you the Twin Frozr III GPU cooler a custom designed PCB and a factory overclock. Not bad at all and the MSI GeForce GTX 660 Twin Frozr OC Edition was quieter and ran cooler than the reference design card, which helped the overall user experience. The only downside to this design is that the PCB is slightly larger and since it is custom, there is a chance that no one will make a waterblock for it. This or any custom card is highly suggested for those that don't plan on going with a water cooling solution as for a little extra money you get what we feel is a much nicer card. Both cards are backed by a 3-year warranty, although EVGA allows you to upgrade it to 5 or 10 years upon registration.

As far as gaming goes at resolutions of 1920X1080 the card played fairly well with all the settings set to their maximum visual best, but for some any framrates dropping below 60 are not feasible and for that crowd the Ti is a better solution as the 660 hovered in the upper 40s to mid 50s range in most games. All games were totally playable and looked great and at higher resolutions of 2560X1440 the Twin Frozr GTX 660 did fairly well also, running in the low 40s and mid 30s in our testing. The card is made to compete with the 7750 and will come to market at around $229.00 arriving on shelves as you read this review. With its low power requirements and gaming and work performance as well as running almost slilent I think the GeForce GTX 660 series will be a hit with budget gamers worldwide. At the end of the day MSI's Twin Frozr GTX Overclocked 660 is the best priced card in NVIDIA’s GTX lineup and for the price point it is set at it deserves our Editor’s Choice Award as many an NVIDIA gaming fan will be buying this card. Thanks for reading make sure to check out our gaming and review videos of this new card on our YouTube channel.

Both the MSI and EVGA cards in this review will be available at launch for just $219, making for great value added propositions. Though EVGA does hold a slight edge in performance and warranty support, MSI surges ahead when temperatures and acoustics are taken into account. The choice between these two products will likely come down to brand preference since each provide a phenomenal gaming experience without charging a premium. We’d highly recommend either one even though they only add 3-7% to in-game framerates. More importantly, both of these GTX 660s showed plenty of overclocking poise which allowed them to match and in some cases surpass the GTX 660 Ti with minimal effort on the end user’s part. The GTX 660 isn’t quite a game changer but it offers enough performance to satisfy the vast majority of gamers and its mere presence will likely cause mid-tier graphics card prices to reach new levels of affordability. Many were hoping that Kepler would finally hit the $199 price point but that hasn't quite happened, nor will it happen anytime soon unless the GTX 660 receives a price cut. But until then, the GTX 660’s accessible price, relatively high performance and wide-ranging feature set should have a profound impact upon the PC gaming market.