We take a look at our first retail NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 660 Ti video card in the form of the Power Edition model from MSI.
Much to the horror of NVIDIA and a number of their partners, we had the opportunity to look at the new GTX 660 Ti GPU in both stock form and overclocked form well ahead of the official launch today. Today we look at our first retail sample based on the new GPU and that comes from MSI in the form of the GTX 660 Ti 2GB Power Edition.
Being a Power Edition video card our approach would be to overclock this bad boy, but because it's the first retail GTX 660 Ti that we've received, we want to see just how this model compares out of the box compared to the reference clocked version we looked at the other week. Once we've done that we'll revisit the card in another article that will be published soon and see just what the Power Edition name brings to the table when it comes to achieving an overclock and how it differs to the overclock we got out of the reference card.
As always, though, we've got a number of things to do before we get into the performance side of things at stock speeds and the first piece of information we'll be looking at is the package which will also give us a chance to cover some of the main features that are on offer. Once we've done that we'll move onto the card itself to see what is going on with the cooling side of things before we look at the specifications of the model to see just what kind of clocks this model comes with when compared to the reference NVIDIA clocks.
Then it will be time to get into the testbed, cover the cards that we'll be using in our graphs today and then get into the performance of the new model. As mentioned, though, let's first take the time to look at what's going on with the package here today on the MSI GTX 660 Ti 2GB Power Edition.
Looking at the front of the box we can see that we've got the typical Power Edition color scheme. Opening the flap up you can see MSI expand on some of the information. With highlights on the Triple Overvoltage features; probably one of the larger standouts for the Power Edition cards along with the Military Class components. We can also see a couple of the other highlights here include an Enhanced PWM design and of course MSI Afterburner support.
As we move to the bottom half of the box you can see we get a glimpse of the card itself and MSI move the focus to what exactly the Twin Frozr IV cooler is capable of with its dual 80mm fans, multiple heatpipes, High-Density heatsink and nickel-plated copper base to name just some of the features. Turning the box over goes into some mode specific details in regards to the GTX 660 Ti itself. We'll cover this information a little later on when we move into the specification side of things.
Finally the last thing we need to look at before we move onto the card is the actual bundle. We really don't have heaps going on with the normal line up of paperwork and driver CD present. Along with that we've got a single DVI to VGA connector and two dual Molex to 6-pin PCIe power connectors to round everything off.