GTX 660 or HD 7850?

The 7870. It's dropping in price.

Uhh, I don't think my 460 watts power supply would power the HD 7870. But it's another great card to consider as well.

^ +1

HD7850 would get my vote if you couldn't get the HD7870, however. The overclocking potential and memory bandwidth are the selling points for me.

I personally wouldn't purchase GTX660's/Ti this generation due to the memory interface...

What model is your PSU? 7870's aren't a very power hungry card.

+1 about the memory interface

I've been going nVidia for multiple generations, but right now I can't recommend them to anyone. Their design approach is just cheap.

Agreed.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-660-ti-...

This says it all  

I would definitely get the GTX 660. The memory bottleneck isn't nearly as big on the GTX 660 as it is on the GTX 660 ti, the 660 can still overclock to 660 ti performance.

Edit: this is considering the 660 vs 7850. The 660 vs 7870 is another story.

Wow. Just gone for 30 minutes, and already got lots of replies. Anyways, I don't know my power supply brand, since its a Dell OEM. But here's my power supply specs:

DC output: Max output power: 460W

+12V A - 18A
+12V B - 16A
+12V C - 8A
+3.3V - 17A
+5V - 25A
-12V - 0.3A
+5V aux - 2.0A

+5V and + 3.3V shall not exceed 142W
+12VA, +12VB, and +12VC shall not exceed 385W

It also have two 6 pins power connectors. Is it weird to have two 6 pins on a 460 watts PSU?

Yes, it's a little puzzling...

With that PSU, I would only feel comfortable running either a GTX660 or Radeon HD7850 as they only require one 6-pin PCI-E.

On a side note, you may want to upgrade your PSU. I can NEVER trust OEM PSU's...

I don't really know. But I heard someone that have the same Dell computer as me, he runs a HD 6870 with no problem. Does Dell tends to underrate their power supplies? That's what I heard from some people and articles.

Never mind. The HD 7870 uses more power as the HD 6870 by 20 watts. I guess I will go for either GTX 660 or HD 7850 instead. So, out of those two cards, excluding HD 7870, which one is the better choice?

Definitely the 7850. The 660's memory interface is really a killer, plus the overclocking potential of the 7850 (if you're interested) is much better.

edit: spelling

7850 by a large margin. If you upgrade your PSU in the future, you can have GTX580 level performance, which is killer for a card costing as much as a 7850 currently does.

Looks like the HD 7850 is alot better. But I really want to ask, what makes the lower memory bandwidth of the GTX 660 so bad? It does make huge differences with AA on, but is there any other effects that the lower memory bandwidth causes?

Dell's PSU's are pretty solid, they usually made by Fortron or HiPro. Both are solid companies and the PSUs are rated by CONTINOUS max wattage, instead of peak like many cheaper PSUs.

Also the GTX 660 is a fair bit faster. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/549?vs=660&i=372...

Lower minimum frame rates, and as time goes on, the bad effects will only get worse. Also, because performance is often limited by bandwidth, overclocking does not scale as well.

You do realize that due to the reduced number of of CUDA cores, the GTX 660 is not nearly as bottlenecked as the GTX 660 Ti, right? Also overclocking, especially memory scales normally as the 192 bit bus is not completely saturated under stock speeds. Can you actually prove lower minimum framerates or is that just supposition? Also as time goes on, more mature drivers will continue to increase performance for the 600 series, not make the card worse then it is today. Compared to next gen cards, the card is not going to seem powerful, but that's the case with any video card and next gen tech.

If this was a case of HD 7870 vs GTX 660, it'd be different.

I get your point. Your right, they reduced the amount of CUDA cores, so it makes it better for the 192 bit memory interface. I still can't decide which card to choose after looking all of your opinions. But I kept wanting the GTX 660 over the HD 7850, I just don't know why.

I am looking forward in this card: http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-GeForce-SIGNATURE2-Graphics-...

Do you think its a great video card to go for?

Thanks. Now what I need is to save up money for the card.  

Best answer selected by ipwn3r456.