olivierhacking

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Which is the better choice in terms of mainly silence and then temps? MSI OC Power Edition 660Ti or ASUS DCII OC (not Top) 660Ti?
Do they both overvolt?
 
Hmm I'm going to disagree here tomshardware did a article on the 660ti cards and well you be the judge

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/geforce-gtx-660-ti-memory-bandwidth-anti-aliasing,review-32522-17.html

Asus quote
" Asus' GTX 660Ti DirectCU II has the most powerful cooler and is the quietest card in our round-up. But even though it manages to keep the GPU running at low temperatures, the same cannot be said for the PCB or some of the components mounted on it, which get very hot. The cooler keeps up with the GPU under full load, maintaining low fan speeds. However, the rest of the card can use more airflow. More disturbing was the card's failure during our benchmarking session. It was never overclocked, and its GPU Boost levels were pretty low (about 250 MHz behind MSI's N660 Ti PE 2GD5/OC). We could even get through our suite without it crashing, so we can't give it any sort of recommendation. "
 
Yeah you should read TechPowerUp,hardocp,anandtech,hardwarecanucks those are the ones i read and trust. Nvidia's GeForce GTX 660 @ The Tech Report

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GTX_660_Ti_Direct_Cu_II/
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_660_Ti_Power_Edition/

Performance Oddities Investigated

Throughout our in-game testing some interesting performance discrepancies were noticed. Some of these focused upon the ASUS GTX 660 Ti TOP which had the highest on-paper boost clocks but failed to consistently beat Gigabyte’s offering and at times even struggled to stay ahead of the MSI Power Edition. We also noticed that as we progressed through our four benchmark runs of each game, the EVGA GTX 660 Ti SC and NVIDIA’s reference card both showed slightly lower framerates from one repetition to the next. Granted, ASUS’ card still came out as the overall performance winner once the dust settled and EVGA’s provided more than adequate performance but we were left wondering: what was going on?

Uploaded with ImageShack.us In our investigation the primary focus was upon each card’s clock speeds being the culprit and those assumptions bore fruit in short order. According to our findings, the ASUS TOP seemed to be unable to consistently hit the upper ranges of its Boost frequencies. Instead, it tended to fluctuate up and down quite a bit, with a few peaks that thrust up into extremely high clock speed ranges. Comparing and contrasting these results to those from MSI, Gigabyte and Galaxy cards puts things into stark contrast since these other products hit a mark and stay there throughout the benchmark, sometimes resulting in higher performance.

The two reference-based cards also showed an interesting side of their personas as their clock speeds gradually decreased throughout the test, resulting in the aforementioned performance drop-off up until their fans increased speed a bit. Now, the difference between maximum frequencies and where these cards end up after a few minutes is infinitesimal in the grand scheme of things and an end user will never notice anything but on paper at least, you’ll be losing a few frames per second here and there.

Uploaded with ImageShack.us Within Batman, our results for the ASUS card were actually well in line with expectations as it provided class-leading framerates regardless of its constant clock speed dance. However, once again the EVGA SC and reference clocked cards exhibit a tendency to step back their clock speeds but this time it looks like the Power Limit is stepping in as well. However, be it TDP, Power Limit, temperatures or some combination thereof, we are seeing a general downgrading of Boost values over the course of our benchmark.

This brings whole exercise could bring up some worrying points about benchmarking NVIDIA’s Kepler-based cards in reviews (and charts) where every single FPS counts. Sites benchmarking with a single run or shorter sequences will likely achieve the “best” results rather than realistic performance. Luckily, we have been able to avoid this issue by using four run-throughs of every benchmark, each with somewhat long testing times. We’ll have a full article looking at GeForce Boost and AMD’s equivalent in the coming weeks but for the time being, this is certainly food for thought. Temperature Analysis

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at its highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Windows 7 desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.

Uploaded with ImageShack.us While there really wasn’t that much to distinguish any of these cards apart from the others in the performance testing, one would have hoped temperatures would be a deciding factor in some cases. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case since every one of the custom GTX 660 Ti’s provided excellent cooling results, beating the reference design by a significant margin. The only odd man out was the EVGA SC which actually posted higher than reference results but remember, our “reference” card is just the SC with a different BIOS so it still makes use of the upgraded internal heatsink.


Acoustical Testing

What you see below are the baseline idle dB(A) results attained for a relatively quiet open-case system (specs are in the Methodology section) sans GPU along with the attained results for each individual card in idle and load scenarios. The meter we use has been calibrated and is placed at seated ear-level exactly 12” away from the GPU’s fan. For the load scenarios, a loop of Unigine Heave 2.5 is used in order to generate a constant load on the GPU(s) over the course of 20 minutes.

Uploaded with ImageShack.us If we had to split hairs, ASUS obviously won this round with some incredibly low acoustics even though it does have extremely high clock speeds. However, the competition isn’t all that far behind and regardless of what this chart shows, we can almost guarantee that the GTX 660 Ti cards from MSI, Gigabyte and Galaxy will sound just as quiet regardless of what our highly sensitive meter says. Once again, EVGA’s SC edition trails the pack but it still provides an extremely quiet gaming experience.


System Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.

Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


Uploaded with ImageShack.us The GTX 660 Ti isn’t exactly the most efficient card in NVIDIA’s current lineup and with a bit of overclocking, it consumes more power than a GTX 670. Unfortunately, that causes its performance per watt to fall somewhat in comparison to other SKUs. Overclocking Results

Overclocking NVIDIA’s Kepler architecture can be a complicated process since it includes modification of Power Limits, clock speeds and Boost offsets. However, that shouldn’t dissuade anyone from trying to get the most out of their GTX 660 Ti.

For these tests, we used ASUS’ excellent GPU Tweak EVGA’s Precision, MSI’s very popular Afterburner and Galaxy’s little known but highly capable Xtreme Tuner Plus. Unfortunately, Gigabyte still doesn’t have their own overclocking utility so we ended up using Afterburner to overclock their GTX 660 Ti OC.

In all cases we added 100mV to the core and GDDR5 while MSI’s Power Edition was the only card to support a 50mV bump in PLL voltage as well. As with all other Kepler-based overclocking experiences, we set the Power Limit to the absolute maximum while the fans were left at their default speed. All results are considered 24/7 stable.

Uploaded with ImageShack.us As we can see, ASUS’ TOP edition wins this section hands down. It seems like they have built higher power limits into their card which allows it to Boost to extremely high frequencies when given enough voltage. The products from MSI and Galaxy are extremely close behind while EVGA and Gigabyte bring up the rear.

Uploaded with ImageShack.us Source:

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/56432-gtx-660-ti-roundup-asus-evga-gigabyte-galaxy-msi.html
 

olivierhacking

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Thanks for the responses. The point is, I want to overclock the card significantly. Of course I need overvoltage support for this, and I do not see this function mentioned on Asus' website of the card.
I will look into the reviews a bit more as well.
 

olivierhacking

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If they cost the same, I would get the MSI card. But the ASUS is 20 euros cheaper for me and comes with a Borderlands 2 coupon which I will sell for another 20-30 euros, so at least a 40 euro difference (+- 50 US $)
 
oh o.k. i understand now.Well that makes a big difference i agree
 

olivierhacking

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But the 7950 is also more expensive :/
True, it will overclock more. But looking at benches from Anandtech, I don't justify the increased price relevant to the performance increase (I play BF3 the most, and in that game the 660ti actually does better than the 7950, LinusTechTips on Youtube also confirmed this in one of his videos).
 

olivierhacking

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Hmm, I see your point. I'm surprised with how much impact on performance it has to overclock either of the cards! (660/7950).
But the point is that the Asus GTX 660 Ti DC2 is quite a lot qieter than the 7950 (at load)- or am I wrong?
I am just all for silence and overclocking. :)