It’s late summer and some of the biggest PC games of the year are just around the corner. There’s Borderlands 2, Dishonored, Medal of Honor Warfighter, the obligatory Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and many more. You’ll need DX11 muscle to fully enjoy these morsels and here we have yet another perfect product from ASUS to get you in that upgrade/new build mood.
Get psyched for a tooth and nail sort of fight
The GeForce GTX 660 Ti DirectCU II TOP takes the 1344 CUDA core 28nm NVIDIA GPU and augments it in several ways. First of all, as a TOP card, it uses a hand-picked core that allows more overclocking right from the factory. Instead of the usual 980MHz boost clock of the reference 660 Ti, the ASUS TOP version has a boost clock setting of 1137MHz, which is a major gain with no effort on your part.
It's the extra features that will save the day
For cooling the DirectCU thermal design results in around 20% lower temps in most tests using those direct contact copper heatpipes we’ve seen so many times before, plus an efficient heatsink that’s also bigger than what the ref cards give you. I like the dual fans here: they’re noticeably quiet, even when under heavy load.
The card has 2GB GDDR5 memory clocked at 6008MHz and the memory interface is 192-bit, though personally I’d prefer 256-bit. In real world usage this makes very little difference.
ASUS DIGI+ VRM digital voltage regulation and strong Super Alloy Power components make this 660 Ti ideal for overclockers, and should you be one then you’ll definitely be able to pull a few more frames per second out of this guy. You can use your overclocking method of choice, but ASUS does bundle the GPU Tweak utility with the card.
Let’s take a look at some more pics now:
New packaging - even sturdier than before
Held tight for shipping
Make your gaming season titanium-grade
Very prominent DirectCU heatpipes and two 6-pin connectors
Every graphics card has two sides...
The backplate is pretty nice, too, and comes with its own foamy packing support
Great ports! The 2-slot card offers HDMI, DisplayPort, and two DVIs
The front of the card shows the nice heatsink with the fan in the background
Suds McSoapdish
Thirty years ago, toddler Suds got his first taste of just how enjoyable technology can be when his parents gave him an Atari 2600. He soon picked up on the wonders of the Commodore 64, and the rest is history in the form of a long list of consoles, 80’s home computers and PCs built and assembled with great fervor. Writing and technology gradually moved up from hobbies to professions as Suds became the man he is today, and although he’s worked and traveled the world and experienced many things, technology, especially computing and gaming, has remained a solid constant.