GTX 660 SLI or GTX 770
- Thread starter Rush4K
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iam2thecrowe
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- Jul 4, 2010
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a gtx770 would be a little better than a 960......
I used to have sli gtx 660's, note that I now have a 7970......roughly equivalent to a gtx770.
The sli 660's are good when they work well, but as with the current gtx970 and its 4gb which is really 3.5 gb, the 2gb gtx660's are really 1.5gb with .5 gb of slower memory that never gets used. For me, I found the vram to be a limitation, and the fact that sli doesnt work well with all games. Your better off with a faster single card, than 2 mid range cards overall.
Compuser10165
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If you have a gtx 660 right now, I suggest not to SLI. Buy a stronger card; Options:
1. Gtx 970 or R9 390 if you have the budget.
2. R9 290/x, if you can find them at a good price (you can buy them used or refurbished if you want)
3. R9 380 4gb (It outperforms the gtx 960)
4. R9 280X 3gb (a bit more powerful than the R9 380 but with grater power consumption)
P.S. I would't pick a card with only 2gb in 2015. Most new AAA games use more than 2gb vram now.
1. Gtx 970 or R9 390 if you have the budget.
2. R9 290/x, if you can find them at a good price (you can buy them used or refurbished if you want)
3. R9 380 4gb (It outperforms the gtx 960)
4. R9 280X 3gb (a bit more powerful than the R9 380 but with grater power consumption)
P.S. I would't pick a card with only 2gb in 2015. Most new AAA games use more than 2gb vram now.
Compuser10165
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The Asus GTX 970 would be the best choice for games, but if you want to play a game know I suggest the gtx 770 (I'm guessing is not the 4gb version but there's almost no difference), it will give you the overall best experience.
seeingeyegod
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this is the first time I've ever heard someone saying the GTX660 only has 1.5Gb of "real" RAM. Next people will be saying Nvidia cards actually have no RAM, and run purely on the AMD fan boy hate.
iam2thecrowe
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Seriously? i have actually owned the cards. I have had many AMD and Nvidia cards in my time, not a fan of either, just get the best thing for the money at the time, whatever brand i don't care. Just speaking from actual experience. The total memory of the card is 2gb, 1.5gb is on a 192 bit bus link, the other 0.5gb is on a 64bit bus link, hence the driver usually chooses not to use this as its slower. This is the same thing as the latest gtx970 saga with its 4gb ram, but 0.5gb of that is on a much slower bus, the driver/firmware avoids using the slower ram.
read, dont just lash out at things you know nothing about.:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6159/the-geforce-gtx-660-ti-review/2
seeingeyegod
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I've owned many many video cards from Nvidia and ATI/AMD, and other companies. I am aware of the different bus speeds for the 970 3.5 + 500, which leads to people (stupidly) saying that it only has 3.5 total. This is the first time I've heard that the 660 works the same way with 1.5 + 500. I've honestly never heard this "problem" existed with the 660. Doesn't everyone consider it a 2Gb card? Or are we retroactively downgrading them. You seem to think my post was directed personally at you, I'm just saying people say uninformed stuff that has nothing to do with how these cards benchmark and everything to do with comparing e-peens.
iam2thecrowe
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The problem was, when they first reviewed them, there was nothing that could push them past 1.5gb vram usage, and as an owner of one, i found it fine for the first couple years i owned it. then got another in sli when things got choppy in certain games hoping it would improve. It improved overall fps but still had some choppy game play in things like crysis 2 with max detail. I then started looking into vram, and inever seemed to go above 1.5gb so i thought the problem can't be that. Till i stumbled on some threads that it has 1.5gb + 0.5gb slower memory, and none of these users reported higher than 1.5gb vram usage in scenarios that cards like the gtx770 were reporting more. I plugged in a 7970 and low and behold from the same save game in crysis 2 i was hitting 2gb+ vram usage, and the choppy game play had gone. So based on personal experience, I couldn't recommend it, for many new games are using more than 1.5gb vram, given the other option of a gtx770 with full speed 2gb vram. Others have had different experiences, but some people are also more sensitive to stuttering (aka frame time variance) than others.
JUICEhunter
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People didn't care about GPU architecture much back than, just benchmarks so it wasn't as big of a deal, I bet tech sites even talked about about having 2gb with no issues/no corrections.
For Example: The first Titan wasn't the full Keplar architecture, it had some shader cores disabled and people were surprised when Nvidia later launched and said that the 780ti was the full big Keplar with nothing disabled. Since than seems like tech sites really focus on what is/isn't disabled.
For Example: The first Titan wasn't the full Keplar architecture, it had some shader cores disabled and people were surprised when Nvidia later launched and said that the 780ti was the full big Keplar with nothing disabled. Since than seems like tech sites really focus on what is/isn't disabled.
stavrosmast
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