ZOTAC GeForce GTX 660 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.

The Zotac GeForce GTX 660 is an excellent performer for its price range, and it's a great choice if you’re using a 1,080p (1,920x1,080-pixel) monitor. On such LCD monitors, which are becoming the mainstream choice nowadays, it was able to drive even demanding games at playable frame rates with detail settings pushed high. Only those running 27-inch-plus monitors at 2,560-wide resolutions, gamers using multiple monitors, or hard-core players who demand 60fps performance in all games, are likely to want greater performance than what this card delivers. Compared to AMD’s slightly cheaper Radeon HD 7850, we saw performance differences significant enough on the GTX 660 to justify spending a little more for the Nvidia card. The slightly more expensive Radeon HD 7870, on the other hand, was a touch slower with our older test titles, but it did edge ahead of the GTX 660 cards in our DirectX 11 tests, which means it’s likely to have a small advantage in newer games. Still, even with DirectX 11 titles, the performance is close enough that your choice really can be based on brand loyalty and established feature sets.

It's clear that a $110 GeForce GTX 650 and $230 GeForce GTX 660 are strong additions to Nvidia's portfolio. Based on the company's track record with 600-series cards so far (aside from the GeForce GTX 680, that is), we have no reason to believe supply will be problematic. We're happy to see Kepler-based mainstream cards, both of which are able to game at 1920x1080, fill in more of the pricing band.

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. The reference design sits right between AMD's HD 7850 and HD 7870 in terms of performance. ZOTAC's GTX 660 is a close to reference implementation of the GTX 660, which means it does not come with any major changes to the PCB design. Its clocks are essentially those of NVIDIA's reference design with a tiny 13 MHz bump. This little increase helps the card gain a 1% performance increase, nothing relevant in real life, over the NVIDIA GTX 660 reference design. No overclock out of the box means that overclocking will result in a bigger relative performance increase because the factory overclock does not eat into your manual clock headroom. ZOTAC's choice for a smaller cooler makes this one of the shortest, dual-slot gaming cards, which might come in handy in building a small gaming PC. Overall gaming performance of the ZOTAC GTX 660 is enough for most titles at full HD with maximum details and anti-aliasing enabled.