Why buy an OC card?

[julianrooster]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127697
or
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127696
or
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127708

Why spend the $10 more. Cant i just overclock manually? Also would I be worth getting the 3 gig card seeing as im about to go to college and wont have money for another rig for at least 7 years? It cost the same too.

 

[cookybiscuit]

Always pick the card based on cooler, never speed. You said it yourself, you can overclock it manually, but you cant cool it better.

Two things. You don't need the 3GB 660ti, capacity isn't the issue with that card, the 192bit memory bus would stop it from using anything near that. Two, the 7950 is faster and the same price, consider it.

 

[utroz]

I would get the 3GB card personally because games are starting to use more texture memory, and yes you can most likely overclock it past it's OC settings anyways because it has a decent cooling setup.. I don't think that the 192bit memory bus will limit the ram usage that much as long as you don't crank the AA and AF settings to high.. For ten bucks it is worth the extra gig of memory and factory warranty on the Core and Memory OC.

 

[julianrooster]

OK. Does anybody know if there is a big difference in the performance between the 3rd and 4th version twin frozr coolers?

 

[utroz]

Not that big a difference, the 4th version they used new fans that go in reverse when you boot up for a couple seconds to get the dust out. That is about all i can see being different. No big deal at all... I personally rather clean it myself anyways, it is one less thing to go wrong...