Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 Windforce OC review

Product Showcase

So this is already our fourth or fifth GTX 66 review. Gigabyte for this model they took the GK106 GPU and plastered it onto their own design blue colored PCB. When you look at that PCB you'll notice the a very clean design and build quality, the always great ultra durable component selection that Gigabyte market's as UD2 technology. Sure it's 80% marketing, but it doesn't take away the fact that the components are all of better quality.

For the GTX 660 Gigabyte is using an updated WindForce cooler. It's a fairly simple design, but the card is small yet still gets two fans. The cooler works really well as symbiosis with GK106. The noise levels are very  hard to measure and the cooling performance great. We'll show you that in our tests of course.

The card comes factory overclocked albeit not incredible amounts. It runs at a core clock frequency of 1033 MHz and has a boost frequency of 1098MHz. The effective memory data rate (192-bit) is 6008 MHz which follows the reference standard. The card has been equipped with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory.

But lets walk through the product guided by photo's.

Alright, here we have the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 OC edition, the 2GB SKU (stock keeping unit) and its packaging. Overall a nice looking card some dark and blue tones. Let's look at the card from several different viewpoints.

A bit of a bummer is that Gigabyte is still using a blue PCB color. That just doesn't look cool on a black motherboard PCB, which 96% of the motherboards out there have.

The card is equipped with the GK106 GPU that harbors the Kepler GPU architecture. You get the basics like the graphics card, PEG converter cables, manual and a demo and driver CD, though bundles will vary with AIB/AIC partners.

Gigabyte clocks this card at a 1033 MHz baseclock, with a 1098 MHz Boost/Turbo clock and the memory is running at 6008 MHz. This factory tweak positions the card close to the performance level of a GeForce GTX 660 Ti. Mind you that the reference baseclock is 980 MHz, so that's a decent factory clock frequency, albeit not a massive overclock.

The card will come with two GB of graphics memory, which is definitely enough if you are a hardcore gamer with a monitor resolution of 1920x1200 and plenty for a product in this price range. Gigabyte gives the card two DVI connectors (dual-link), one HDMI and a DisplayPort connector (all full size).

The card is PCIe gen 3.0 compatible. Going from PCIe Gen 2 to Gen 3 doubles the bandwidth available to the add-on cards installed, from 500 MB/s per lane to 1 GB/s per lane. ASUS definitely is using their own customized PCB alright.

You can see one SLI connector, the 660 (non-Ti) series is allowed to work with up to two cards in SLI mode. For proper scaling and little driver issues as possible we always recommend to stick to 2 cards in multi-GPU mode anyway. We'll show you SLI results in our article of course.

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