Reminding ourselves that this card comes pre-overclocked straight out of the box to 1006Mhz on the clock speed, giving us a boost clock of 1085MHz and we also find the memory clocked to 1527MHz (6108MHz Effective). We aren’t happy with that though, and will be pushing it even further to see how good this card is, mainly with the JetStream cooler as raising the power also raises the temperatures and good cooling is a must.
As per usual, we will be sticking with our tried and tested method of running some of the best overclocking software available including MSI Afterburner,Furmark, GPU-z and 3DMark 11.
To start with, we increased the core clock on its own while keeping the memory speed at its stock speed of 1527MHz. We proceeded to increase the GPU clock by 20MHz increments before we started to see instability, which is when we need we had to claw things back a bit. This ended up getting us to 1177MHz as a final GPU core clock speed which is a fantastic achievement from the stock 1006MHz. This also increased the boost clock from 1085MHz to 1245MHz.
Once this was out of the way, we made a note of our numbers and then moved on to the memory speed which at stock was running at 1527MHz and with this we did the same as before and increased the speed in 20MHz increments. We managed to get this to 1820MHz but found after a prolonged amount of time, some signs of instability were showing and we dropped it down slightly to 1806MHz.
Now that we had both our maximum GPU clock and maximum memory clocks, we needed to try them together which sometimes works easily, but the majority of the time sees problems and involves us tweaking further. This was the case this time around and saw us having to decrease the GPU clock speed slightly down to 1166MHz and the same with the memory clock down to 1800MHz. This means that we saw a 15% increase in the GPU clock, and a 17% increase on the memory clock which are both fantastic numbers to see.
It’s really impressive. I thought the narrower memory bus would strangle it but it’s not to be. Makes you wonder why people would spend the extra scratch on a GTX 670
because when you get a GTX 670 you can also overclock that. Most reviews tend to go for the “if you overclock this card (the GTX 660Ti in this case) you can catch up with the next one in the series” (the GTX 670) but then if you had the next one in the series (the GTX 670) you could overclock that too and reach the next one in the series (GTX 680)..and the cycle continues…
I know. It’s a vicious cycle. I was sceptical of my GTX 660Ti because of the narrow bus but I decided on it just via reading reviews. I’m glad I did & saved the extra money I would’ve spent on a GTX 670.
Ryan has a point with the overclock thing. I was waiting for the EVGA GTX 670 FTW but since then I got a EVGA GTX 660 Ti (standard edition) and I’m glad I saved my self half the cost, there isn’t a single game I can’t max out on everything. I only run 1920×1080, but check another one of these into SLI and you’ve got a system to be proud of.
For goodness’s sake, please change the COLOR of the graph, and highlight the scores for the card you are reviewing against its closest competitors. It was PAINFUL to read those graphs. Seriously.
Otherwise a decent review.