Do you want to play the latest games, but don't feel you can fork out the cash for some of the more expensive GPU's on the market today? Nvidia might have answered your problems, with the release of two new cards in the Geforce 600 series line of Kepler-based cards; the GTX 660 and 650. The GTX 660 will cost around £179.99, and £89.00 for the GTX 650.
I for one still have the 8800 GTS 640, from what seems like decades ago, but have felt like I've wanted an upgrade for some time. These cards would offer a huge step up from my card, and many even far beyond mine, including the 9800GT, and the 9500GT…
The GTX 660 will deliver performance 4X faster than the 9800 GT, and 8X the performance of the 9500 GT (and well above that for mine I'm sure. 50X maybe?)
These two cards will offer gaming from the newest releases at 1080P and higher with some games running smoothly with Ultra settings, but otherwise high, with the GTX 660, and possibly high but mostly mid settings for the lower GTX 650.
Of course, with the Kepler architecture, you can expect Direct X 11 support, with Tessellation enabled technology, Nvidia PhysX, Nvidia Adaptive VSync, and Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TXAA).
If that wasn't enough techno-babble for you, and for anyone that is interested in this stuff, the GTX 660 offers these figures:
960 CUDA cores, 980Mhz base clock, with a boost clock of 1033Mhz, and 2GB of 192-bit GDDR5 memory.
The GTX 650 offers quite a few less cores, with 384 CUDA cores, but offers a higher base clock, at 1058Mhz, and 1GB of 128-bit GDDR5 memory.
Basically, the more cores, the more the card can do at any one time, and the faster the games will run. The clock speed amounts to how fast the cards can process the information, and the memory handles stuff like textures, and other fancy stuff, to help keep the games running as smooth as possible.
For the price point of the GTX 650 though, you can't really complain, and it will still offer some pretty good performance with the newest games, if you really are on a budget. It certainly blows away older cards at this price point, and will move a lot of machines, and so their owners, into a brighter gaming experience.
Available now, the cards will be available from all leading card suppliers including ASL, ASUS, Colorful, ECS, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, Jetway, Leadtek, MSI, Palit, Point of View, PNY, Sparkle and Zotac.
Expect of course some companies to pre-overclock the cards for some free performance boosts, which can't be a bad thing. If you are into over-clocking yourself, you may be able to get slightly more out of the cards than what comes in the box, though make sure to check the warranties first if you are worried…
One thing is for sure, do not confuse the GTX 660, with the older 660 Ti.
For more information on these new Geforce cards, go to:
http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/geforce-gtx-660-650-launch
What do you think? Sound off down below.
