Which 660 Ti?

i would normally say the MSI power edition since it overclocks much better than other 660tis and eventually would be the better card, but I wouldn't suggest going the SLI route with 660ti's, just my opinion.

The PE is $310 (newegg) and EVGA 3GB is $340. Personally, I wouldn't buy EVGA cards, cuz the other cards perform better and cooler (longevity). Also, if your gonna spend $340 then why not just buy the 7950 for $320? Head to head, the 7950 is better than the 660Ti. The 660Ti is overpriced.

If you live in the US, then I'd highly recommend the 7950. I wanted this, but where I live (Taiwan) its $390, so I bought the PE for $315.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

To answer your question about 3GB. Check out this site and you can compare for yourself the benefit of 2GB vs 3GB by Galaxy cards. Look at the numbers and judge for yourself.
http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/gpu_video_cards/

Your other question about SLI. If you add a second card it won't double the performance. It's probably more like: one card 40fps two cards 70fps.

+1 i agree  

I'd say forget those cards and get a 670 MSI's GTX 670 Power Edition uses the famous Twin Frozr IV cooler from the MSI Lightning and comes with a large clock speed boost out of the box, making its default clock speed even higher than GTX 680 stock clocks. MSI is asking a $30 price premium for their card, which doesn't look unreasonable, given the improved cooling and higher clocks.I've try the card it's http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=w...

If you can get a GTX 660 Ti you can also get a HD 7950 which is the superior card.
But if you prefer Nvidia or need cuda or anything then the GTX 660 Ti is a solid choice.The version i'd recommend is the MSI GTX 660 Ti Power Edition.And also the versions with 3GB VRAM perform a lot worse.

But if you can spend 20% more you should definetly get this card instead
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

i agree with bigcyco. the thing is with the 660 ti, it's just a 670 with lower memory speeds. it has a 192bit 3GHz memory interface. this slows down the card alot at higher resolutions and doing things like AA. some above said that SLIing the cards won't double performance, and usually this is the case, but the memory being the only bottleneck of the card, when you sli them and double the memory speed, it removes that bottleneck and uses 100% of those CUDA cores, which doubles or more than doubles performance. so, when SLIed, those 660 tis are just like sli 670s almost.

but to be honest, i'd just get a 670, and the MSI PE 670 to remove that annoying bottleneck when using a single card. the 670 has 256bit 3GHz memory. that is good enough for high AA and resolutions. you can get a pretty good deal on them if you live in canada. NCIX.ca has them on sale for like 350$ with mafia 2 and borderlands 2 free, and ontop of that, there is usually a 20-30$ rebate. NCIX.ca is great for SSDs, monitors and video cards. they have great pricing and a lot of free gifts for some reason.

Edit: i forgot to mention that i would not suggest going with AMD, like envy14tpe suggested. the 600 series has the FXAA and TXAA which are much better ways to do AA. one is for having much better performance while having the same quality as normal AA and one is for much better quality while using the same/slightly more load. it also has Physx which is always cool to have. because of these eye candy features nvidia has, game developpers seem to be putting more effort into optimizing their games for nvidia instead of AMD, which down the road will help. especially for SLI, which seems to be more effective than AMDs equivalent, crossfire.

what AA still exist is MLAA which both cards can use on both ends, as well as traditional AA. Even so, the AMD counterpart reacts better to Antialiasing because AMD tends to do better in tessellation.


how i would judge cards, I wouldn't want to get better fps in games that already has good fps, I want the fps where it counts, the games that cripple any card when settings are maxed, which AMD does better minimum fps wise on those said games.

Thanks, all. Decided to go with the MSI. I did seriously look into the 7950 but decided against it, mainly due to Nvidias newer AA techniques. I also checked out the 670 and, as nice as it would be, it caries a $100-$150 premium here in the states and that's just too much for. Also, thanks for the information on SLI. On my budget, its a bit of a pipe dream but I was curious.

   

for the current generation, its moderately true, for older generations, its in reverse.


edit: of course it depends on what kind of tesselation is being ran and the card in question.

I always see the Kepler cards way outpacing the AMD cards in tesselation benchmarks like Unigine Heaven and Tess Mark. The newer AMD cards also don't seem to do as well on older games, which seems to be an issue with their driver development focus.