GTX 660 Ti vs Radeon HD 7950?

[mcross162]

Hey guys, I'm about to purchase a new graphic card for my gaming rig I've built and I'm curious to see which you guys think I should go with, a Nvidia GTX 660 Ti or a Radeon HD 7950?

The specific ones I'm looking at:
GTX 660 Ti: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125441

Radeon 7950: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202006

Thanks in advance for any responses/opinions.

 

[FlyingHawk08]

Both of those are great cards, it's up to you to choose.

(I would pick the radeon hd 7950, recent driver updates put it right up to the gtx 660 ti and beats it in some games) (there's a gigabyte card of the hd 7950 on newegg, $25 less)

 

[shamsmu]

Sapphire hd7950 is what I would recommend. You can OC it right out of the box to 1025mhz without even changing the voltage settings, with overvolting you can hit the 1150-1200+ zone. Gtx 660 ti won't be able to keep up with it in the power department.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

if you want physx, the 660ti, if you dont want physx, the 7950. Just make sure you get a good quality psu to go with it and ample CPU power to drive the card to its maximum potential.

 

[commando carrotz]

radeon 7950 because when OC'ed it can stomp gtx 660 Ti

 

[Mephic]

I don't agree with 7950 recommendation. After my 2 dead 7950 GPUs I went back to Nvidia taking MSI 660Ti PE OC Edition - and this was the best choice I've ever made.

I was quite lucky because I got myself 85% asics card which after OC resulted in:

Core with kepler boost: 1333 MHz
Memory effective: 7400 MHz

3583 GFlops
31992 MPix/s
149296 MTex/s
111972 MVts/s
177.8 GB/s (!!! - almost as good as gtx 670 although it has wider mem bandwidth)

So these performance values in GTX 680 STOCK looks like that:

3090 GFlops
32192 MPix/s
128768 MTex/s
96576 MVts/s
192.3 GB/s

Basically I gave myself GTX 680 performance (need some more memory tweaking) but saved up loads of $.

You just have to learn to OC the kepler because it's much harder than OCing different cards. But after You do, with a little bit of luck, You can get great performance.

This is my 3dm 11 score with mem to 7000:

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/6222061

The only flaw of 3dmark11 is that it doesn't cooperate too good with kepler drivers and it results in power percentage draw goin over 100% and card is sometimes throttling in 13mhz increments which results in a bit lower score (it should be around 10500 on gpu score).

Still - I don't throttle in any game, even with resource hog far cry 3. And with 1080p, everything to ultra, and aax4 I get stable 45 FPS plus no latency so I don't get any stutter.

This card can be amazing but You have to treat it well.

 

[gazum123]

Hello,

If I were you I would go for the 660, I just brought the 660 with a Corsiar CX750w and its absolutely amazing. I can play Far Cry 3 on Ultra around 45-60 fps.

I spent a few weeks looking at the cards and to be honest I think Nvidia are abit better. You pay a little more however the drivers are better and Ge force Experience Beta is awesome.

 

[Mephic]

660 is slower (much) - for 1080p I'd get Ti.

 

[Anik8]

I don't agree with 7950 recommendation. After my 2 dead 7950 GPUs I went back to Nvidia taking MSI 660Ti PE OC Edition - and this was the best choice I've ever made.

I was quite lucky because I got myself 85% asics card which after OC resulted in:

Core with kepler boost: 1333 MHz
Memory effective: 7400 MHz

3583 GFlops
31992 MPix/s
149296 MTex/s
111972 MVts/s
177.8 GB/s (!!! - almost as good as gtx 670 although it has wider mem bandwidth)

So these performance values in GTX 680 STOCK looks like that:

3090 GFlops
32192 MPix/s
128768 MTex/s
96576 MVts/s
192.3 GB/s

Basically I gave myself GTX 680 performance (need some more memory tweaking) but saved up loads of $.

You just have to learn to OC the kepler because it's much harder than OCing different cards. But after You do, with a little bit of luck, You can get great performance.

This is my 3dm 11 score with mem to 7000:

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/6222061

The only flaw of 3dmark11 is that it doesn't cooperate too good with kepler drivers and it results in power percentage draw goin over 100% and card is sometimes throttling in 13mhz increments which results in a bit lower score (it should be around 10500 on gpu score).

Still - I don't throttle in any game, even with resource hog far cry 3. And with 1080p, everything to ultra, and aax4 I get stable 45 FPS plus no latency so I don't get any stutter.

This card can be amazing but You have to treat it well.

Did you tweak your voltage ? I got the same card and reached a max of 1267 boost/1777(7108) without tweaking the voltage.

 

[Mephic]

I did tweak my voltage using MSI AB 2.2.3 edition - this one lets You give more MV over 1.175 v, although it won't be displayed in GPU-z, it will make Your OC more stable.

Nvidia locked voltages on 1.175 (normally, these cards went over 1,215 easily) because of the fact, that they were affraid of many cards being RMA'd (7950 for example wasn't locked for long time, but many manufacturers had to deal with many RMAs and now many manufacturers lock it too).

Anyway - what MSI AB lets You do (only on Power Edition/ PE OC cards!) is givin the extra voltage over the limit with older version of software.

And so I did that and got this score (as I said, added +50mv)

I didn't touch PLL voltage, nor memory voltage although I'm very tempted to do it, because on stock memory voltage my card goes to 7400 MHz, so I can probably get myself memory bandwidth from GTX 670.

It is important if Your card is Power Edition or it's not. Other cards won't let so high overclocks. Asus GTX 660Ti DCUII made over 1400 on core in one of the reviews but performance was low because it was power throttling as hell.

 

[Anik8]

Isn't it that all versions of afterburner support voltage tweaking on lightning,hawk and power edition cards?
However I didn't try to tweak the core voltage either as I'm saving the OC for when the time comes and I really need to squeeze out the most from my GPU.Of Course the 550 offset on the memory wasn't a ceiling for me either but I didn't push all the way as I was merely testing the card's capability when I first bought it.I still use the factory settings though as the performance is pretty much enough for playing any games @1080p including crysis 3(V.high,@ Txaa 1 2x) where i get 40+ fps on the avg.

 

[shamsmu]

I don't agree with 7950 recommendation. After my 2 dead 7950 GPUs I went back to Nvidia taking MSI 660Ti PE OC Edition - and this was the best choice I've ever made.

I was quite lucky because I got myself 85% asics card which after OC resulted in:

Core with kepler boost: 1333 MHz
Memory effective: 7400 MHz

3583 GFlops
31992 MPix/s
149296 MTex/s
111972 MVts/s
177.8 GB/s (!!! - almost as good as gtx 670 although it has wider mem bandwidth)

So these performance values in GTX 680 STOCK looks like that:

3090 GFlops
32192 MPix/s
128768 MTex/s
96576 MVts/s
192.3 GB/s

Basically I gave myself GTX 680 performance (need some more memory tweaking) but saved up loads of $.

You just have to learn to OC the kepler because it's much harder than OCing different cards. But after You do, with a little bit of luck, You can get great performance.

This is my 3dm 11 score with mem to 7000:

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/6222061

The only flaw of 3dmark11 is that it doesn't cooperate too good with kepler drivers and it results in power percentage draw goin over 100% and card is sometimes throttling in 13mhz increments which results in a bit lower score (it should be around 10500 on gpu score).

Still - I don't throttle in any game, even with resource hog far cry 3. And with 1080p, everything to ultra, and aax4 I get stable 45 FPS plus no latency so I don't get any stutter.

This card can be amazing but You have to treat it well.

very nice OC scores almost puts my gtx670 to shame lol
http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/6216608

 

[The Q6660 Inside]

7950, The OC potential is better to the point it will hold a really good grudge against a 680 when done carefully. The 7950 is def ahead in AA.
In a sense, the 7950 was meant to compete with the GTX 670.

 

[commando carrotz]

I don't agree with 7950 recommendation. After my 2 dead 7950 GPUs I went back to Nvidia taking MSI 660Ti PE OC Edition - and this was the best choice I've ever made.

I was quite lucky because I got myself 85% asics card which after OC resulted in:

Core with kepler boost: 1333 MHz
Memory effective: 7400 MHz

3583 GFlops
31992 MPix/s
149296 MTex/s
111972 MVts/s
177.8 GB/s (!!! - almost as good as gtx 670 although it has wider mem bandwidth)

So these performance values in GTX 680 STOCK looks like that:

3090 GFlops
32192 MPix/s
128768 MTex/s
96576 MVts/s
192.3 GB/s

Basically I gave myself GTX 680 performance (need some more memory tweaking) but saved up loads of $.

You just have to learn to OC the kepler because it's much harder than OCing different cards. But after You do, with a little bit of luck, You can get great performance.

This is my 3dm 11 score with mem to 7000:

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/6222061

The only flaw of 3dmark11 is that it doesn't cooperate too good with kepler drivers and it results in power percentage draw goin over 100% and card is sometimes throttling in 13mhz increments which results in a bit lower score (it should be around 10500 on gpu score).

Still - I don't throttle in any game, even with resource hog far cry 3. And with 1080p, everything to ultra, and aax4 I get stable 45 FPS plus no latency so I don't get any stutter.

This card can be amazing but You have to treat it well.

Well, it may have had to dealt with what brand radeon 7950 you had because usually radeon lasts a pretty long time. Call me a fanboy but i like radeon better because of its oc abilities but u hav your side of ur arguement and i respect that

 

[Mephic]

It's a bit like Core i5 2500K vs 3570K.

2500K OC was much easier, just overvoltage it as hard as You can, put maximum clock You can and it will be probably stable - this is similar to 7950.

On the other hand 3570K was about careful overclock, temp monitoring but overall performance is awesome and You can get good results only after long work with PLL voltages and stuff... and this is basically like Kepler.

Both are great - it's just a matter of attitude. It's a shame I couldn't get good 7950 because I really liked the idea of memory bandwidth. Still I'm happy with what I have.