Hardware review site Tweaktown appears to have got its hands on an early sample of NVIDIA's forthcoming GeForce GTX 660Ti , and put it through its paces for a full review. The 660 Ti is perhaps the most important graphics card to be released this year, combining (as it potentially does) the impressive processing power of NVIDIA's Kepler architecture with a mid range price.
As far as I know, there aren't too many of these cards in circulation yet, and the sites that have them are prepping for an official launch some time this month. Tweaktown is breaking the general review embargo, however, as a result of some beef with NVIDIA not having enough “respect” for them.
The review does have the veneer of authenticity about it. According to a GPU-Z screenshot in the review, the 660Ti has the same number of unified shader cores as a GTX 670 running at the same speed, but with fewer ROPS and a narrower memory bus. While that's might sound like a surprising combination, based on past releases, it does tally with other rumours that have been doing the rounds.
According to Tweaktown's testing - which will obviously be on unofficial drivers - performance is a fair bit less than a GTX 670, but still looking promising. Judging by the specs, I'd also expect more mature drivers to close that gap considerably, especially at single screen resolutions where the memory bandwidth isn't such an issue.
The nearest competitor is AMD's HD7950, which currently costs around £250. I'd expect the GeForce GTX 660Ti to go on sale for a bit less than that - the GTX 560Ti was around £200 at launch - but it's all guesswork really.
Providing the price is right, and Tweaktown's review is genuine, it looks like a shoe-in for the PC Gamer Rig and a general recommendation as the must buy card. But we'll only know for sure when our own review samples arrive.
Take a look at the full feature and decide for yourself.
