MSI GTX 660ti PE vs Sapphire HD7950 Vapor X

instantcoffeenz

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Nov 14, 2012
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Hey everyone. After much research I have come down to 2 cards that I would like to buy, im from new zealand so the prices are higher.

The MSI GTX 660ti Power Edition which is $500
The Sapphire HD7950 Vapor X which is $470

From what Ive seen everyone has the "HD7950 hands down" response to the gtx660 ti and hd7950 and yet when I look at the benchmarks and youtube videos the gtx 660ti usually outperforms or loses in the odd case. Newegg customers seem to really love the msi gtx 660ti and too the sapphire hd7950 but more seem to have issues with the hd7950. I read the argument is that the hd7950 has more bus and video ram. It has more shader units and so forth yet the 660ti is on par with this card in performance.

I guess my question is simply which card is better without a biased opinion and from someone who knows what they are talking about or has seen both cards in action to shed some light on the matter because I see a card with more bus width more video ram high shader units etc that's on par with a card that is not and leads me to believe that the processor on the nvidia card is simply much faster and better quality. I don't claim to be an expert, I don't know a hell of a lot about graphics cards so don't attack me for something I have said that isn't correct I would just love a better understanding.

Cheers!
 
Solution
relax guys :).

@ instantcoffeenz

this review from tech report might interest you:

http://techreport.com/review/23981/radeon-hd-7950-vs-geforce-gtx-660-ti-revisited

http://techreport.com/review/24022/does-the-radeon-hd-7950-stumble-in-windows-8

http://techreport.com/review/24051/geforce-versus-radeon-captured-on-high-speed-video

personally i take that both card are good. in your case some people will choose 7950 because it is a bit cheaper and it has 1GB more VRAM than GTX660 Ti which is matter if the person consider to jump into multi monitor gaming.

hytecgowthaman

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Buy 7950 .my opinion is msi made low cost products but quickly they raise complind ex : iam see many msi motherboards malfuntuning and after 10 to 12 months many mobo bios failed.then only u buy another mobo the custamer care is not curing this.
 

instantcoffeenz

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Yes but why? the only argument that gets put forward is the high bus width and video ram which doesn't seem to make a huge difference. I do see the hd7950 pull away at redulous high resolutions or multi monitor performance but other than that.
 

instantcoffeenz

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It sounds like everybody has read a comment of someone saying hd7950 is better and followed it without question. Is there a comparison of the 2 cards with 12.11 drivers for amd against a non reference gtx 660ti? I really want to be convinced
 

Potential

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I agree. I don't know why everyone automatically jumps on board with AMD. Although I do agree that MSI isn't an exceptional company. Look into this gpu. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121658

I was going with that until I switched my build around a bit and went with the ASUS GTX680-DC2T-2GD5 2GB which is $540.
 

instantcoffeenz

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Asus is really expensive in my country way overprices compared to everything. not that it matters either I really hate the look of their coolers. If they were well priced I would have considered them :) thanks for your response! why is MSI bad? I really like the look of their cards , they are cool and quiet and from my experience it has been very good!.
 

cooldudesubho

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i really like the way techreports benchamrks.Really love there latency test.Which tells you which card is giving more stuttering and which is smooth.No other tech site does it.Which is a real shame.Since framerate alone can't give you that smooth feel.Some game even at 80 frames feels stuttery than some at 40FPS.
 
that's why they say frame rates alone does not tell the story. hard ocp also mention about this smoothness in most of their SLI vs CFX review though they did not do detail works like tech report does. they simply write in their summary how they feel about it when they do the test and did not have real data to back it up. some people suggesting they represent the data like tech report did but they said they can't just carbon copy the method use by tech report.
 

Anik8

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First of all we're talking about performance through recent drivers.The anandtech bench is months old and even in there if you go downwards, the 660 ti wins.

@cooldudesubho
yea they've doing a nice job in their style of reviewing GPUs.
 

technoholic

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I want to put my 2 cents here. The 2 mentioned cards perform very similarly in almost all game benchmarks. The difference (aside from the architectural differences) is that the 660Ti has 192bit bus BUT has a higher memory speed with less memory amount (2gb). 7950 has 384bit bus BUT has a lower memory speed WITH more amount of memory (3gb). The ultimate (potential) performance difference come from the overclock-ability of 7950. The only weaker point of this card is its lower memory speed compared to 660ti. 660ti's is its 192bit bus. Why do they say "7950 hands down"? Because a 7950 will reach very high bandwidth (twice the amount of 660Ti's i'd dare to say) with memory overclocking (which is not so hard to do) and will destroy a 660Ti in bandwidth intensive stuff (at least in theory)
 

Anik8

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Wow you just went too much carried away there.First of all when it comes to memory speed in particular amd couldn't give their cards much headroom and hence they were forced to release their cards much below the 6GHz data rate.Hence it is not much overclock-able either without increasing any voltages.
nvidia released their kepler cards at 6Ghz data-rate and they have provided much headroom in there too such that they've even shown how synchronous these card's data rate is with diagrams showing profound data streams.
People can overclock memory speeds of 680s,670s,660 ti-s and 660s to higher than 7.2Ghz easily without increasing any voltage.Even I've tried and successfully breached that mark.
 

technoholic

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I already mentioned what you say...anyway, here is what i mean (produced bandwidth):

Radeon - (384 / 8) * 1200 * 4 = 230,400MB/s
GeForce - (192 / 8) * 1500 * 4 = 144,000MB/s

Overclocked (+250 Mhz):
Radeon- (384 / 8) * 1450 * 4 = 268,800MB/s
GeForce - (192 / 8) * 1750 * 4 = 168,000MB/s

You can't alter bus width, but you can overclock memory speed. As the higher overclocking is involved, the gap will be higher. All in all, these are numbers on paper and may not represent the final outcome. Like i mentioned before, this is my 2 cents of theoretical information that i see about the difference between 2 architectures.

EDIT: LOL sorry i miscalculated the radeon cause a 7950 has 1250mhz default not 1200. And also a 7950 can reach high overclocks without valtage-tweaking too. Many people can achieve around 1500mhz memory clocks without altering voltage.
 

technoholic

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High MSAA for example 8x and probably very high resolutions. Though these are theoretical information what i share, i already provided the calculations. The 2 companies follow different approaches in their designs. AMD put higher bus but lower memory, Nvidia put lower bus but higher speed. At last, game engines, optimizations, detail levels etc will differ a lot and those differences i talked about MAY/MAY NOT show in real life.
 
it does show in that situation (high level of MSAA or high resolution) in some games. but whenever there is talk about 7k series vs 600 series in AA aspect some people jump to conclusion that nvidia 600 series can't do AA at all. this review did the test how well GTX660Ti handle AA:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/08/27/nvidia_geforce_gtx_660_ti_at_high_aa_settings_review/7

The Radeon HD 7950 has a 384-bit memory bus with 240GB/sec of memory bandwidth, while the GALAXY GTX 660 Ti GC has a 192-bit bus with 144GB/sec of memory bandwidth, yet we sometimes see the GALAXY GTX 660 Ti GC video card performing faster, but the 660 Ti does have a GPU clock advantage. We don't see that 66% advantage in memory bandwidth the Radeon HD 7950 has in real-world gaming with high setting AA configurations. This means there are other factors besides the width of the memory bus and the bandwidth that affect performance between these two cards; namely GPU clock and architecture advantages.