Palit GeForce GTX 660 Ti 2GB JetStream Graphics Card Review

When we reviewed the 660 Ti OC from Gigabyte back in August, we were so pleased with it that it ended up being awarded with our Editor’s Choice award as we felt that both Nvidia and Gigabyte did a great job and it showed their partnership was strong, and we’ve got exactly the same story here with Palit and their JetStream edition which impressed us in many areas.

First off, the styling is certainly unique and that’s interesting and will find people buying it purely because it looks “different” and has a slightly better quality feel than other cards we’ve had in from competitor brands. The quality mainly revolves around the cooling solution with includes a dual fan design which light up with blue LEDs. Now normally I’m not a big fan of blue LEDs on any part or component, but it seems to work quite nicely here with the black shrouding and black translucent fan blades.

The card comes straight out of the factory with some strong numbers, that Palit’s overclocking team have set into it and these provide some extreme performance for a good price point. From our benchmarks, you can see that this card beat the AMD equivalents throughout the majority of the tests and even peaked above some higher-specification Nvidia cards at that. While the performance was great, we also took a look to see if we could push things even further and found that this card frankly didn’t want to stop being pushed and saw us gain some great increases by some very simple overclocking which took little to no time to do and even novice users should find overclocking this card simple and welcoming.

We were extremely impressed by the JetStream cooling giving some low noise values, keeping the core and memory temperatures low and though it has the blue LEDs and twin fan design, the power consumption was at a reasonable level also. The thing that surprised us the most was the idle temperatures which frankly blew everything out of the water and this goes to show that the JetStream cooler really is a gem in its own right and remains quiet throughout operation too.

Another big area that this card seriously wins some mega award points is the price, especially when comparing against AMD models in the marketplace. The 7950 retails anywhere from £220 upwards and this card currently retails at big retailers for around £235 showing that when looking at the performance on offer and the price, it really does offer some serious bang for buck which AMD simply can’t compete with. We even saw this card beating the 7970 which actually retails for around £100 more than the 660 Ti JetStream, so it really does go to show that the lesser known brands can be competitive and offer great products too and we’d be happy to look at any more products Palit may send us, as this card has really been an eye opener to the brand, their products and how they offer something most other cards can’t; everything. It really does tick every box in terms of style and design, performance, overclockability, features, and of course price, so what else could you ask for?

When looking at other 660 Ti based products in the market place, you will find they retail for slightly higher prices and with our example of the Gigabyte OC version, it did perform slightly better but the Palit still wins handsdown in terms of sheer cooling performance so we invite you to think about all of the factors before going straight out and buying the first 660 Ti that you see, as the Palit JetStream is a force not to be reckoned with.