NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Video Card Review w/ MSI and EVGA

MSI GeForce GTX 660 Twin Frozr

First up we have the MSI N660 TF 2GD5 OC (or N660 Twin Frozr 2GD5 OC). This video card uses the new GK106 GPU along with MSI Twin Frozr III GPU cooler and a custom PCB design. This card has an MSRP of $239.99, which is $10 more than the NVIDIA reference design. For an extra $10 you get an entirely custom card with a factory overclock, so MSI certainly looks like they are offering a pretty good value here with this GeForce GTX 660 video card model.

MSI will have two GeForce GTX 660 offerings. The fist is the N660 TF 2GD5 OC, which is
gracing our pages here with a price of $239.99. The second card will be the NVIDIA reference design and it will carry a $229.99 price tag. For $10 more, the
N660 TF 2GD5 OC is a steal!

Inside the box we found a small bundle of goodies that includes a DVI to VGA adapter and a molex to 6-pin PCI-e power adapter. Also included was an owners manual, user guide and a driver disk with the MSI Afterburner
overclocking utility and drivers.

The MSI
GeForce GTX 660 Twin Frozr is clearly a departure from the reference
design heat sink and cooler. At start up the fans are audible but
quickly fade to nearly inaudible. The heat sink does a great job of
keeping the card cool but does tend to dump some heat into the rest of
the system since there is no fan shroud to push exhaust out of the system. The MSI Twin Frozr III GPU cooler is comprised of three heatpipes (1x 8mm SuperPipe and 2x 6mm pipes) along with two 80mm Propeller Blade fans.

The clock speeds of this overclocked card are 1033MHz GPU Core, 6008MHz memory, and 1098MHz GPU Boost. The MSI GeForce GTX 660 PCB measures 8.75″ in length, so this card is fairly short and should be able to fit in almost any PC case without a big issue.

MSI uses a single 6-pin PCI-e power connector on the GeForce GTX 660 TWIN FROZR OC Edition and suggests a minimum 450W or greater PSU with at least 24 Amps on the +12V rail. Getting to this power connector is easy as it is located on the top edge of the card and the GPU cooler tapers off just before it. In the image above you can also see the massive 8mm SuperPipe that runs along the top edge of the card.

The MSI GeForce GTX 660 might feature a custom PCB, but MSI kept the reference design connectors on the card. This means you have a pair of DVI connectors, the bottom is a DVI-I while the top is DVI-D. You also have Display
Port and HDMI video connections on the left side of the card. One thing that we did notice is that MSI moved the DVI ports to the bottom edge of the card, which allowed them to put more exhaust ports in the bracket.

Here we have the back side of the card where we can see that MSI is using four Samsung GDDR5 memory
chips, but that is about all the interesting stuff to look at.

The MSI GeForce GTX 660 OC video card uses 2048MB (2GB) of Samsung GDDR5 memory. The exact part number is K4G20325FD-FC03. According
to the Samsung website these specific IC’s are rated to run at 6.0Gbps (0.3ns) at 1.55V.

All NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 cards have a single SLI interconnect/bridge, which means they are 2-way SLI ready! Running 3-way or 4-way SLI is impossible on these cards.