 Welcome to a very exciting unboxing. This is the all new GeForce GTX 660 Ti, and this particular one is actually pretty special. This is MSI's power edition of the card, which features their triple over voltage, enhanced PWM design, as well as their twin-frozer 4 cooler, which is the, as you might be able to guess, fourth iteration of their twin-frozer cooler. Twin-frozer is a funny thing because when I first heard of a twin-frozer cooler, I was like, oh, they spelled it wrong, because it's FROZR. And then I was like, were they paying a consultancy firm per character to come up with the name for it or something? And then I kind of got used to it, and at this point I don't care anymore, because a twin-frozer just basically means it's an awesome dual fan cooler, and so I don't worry too much about if it's spelled correctly or not. So I mean, that's the thing about branding, is what's a Kijiji? If you get used to it long enough, then it just doesn't really matter anymore. Anyway, I digress. Let's talk about graphics cards. So this is based on Nvidia's GK104 chip, which for the first time in my memory anyway, for the first time, we're seeing the same chip that's featured in their high-end flagship single GPU product, their dual GPU product, now in an X6-something product level. So this is a mid-range card in terms of the price point that we're going to see. Well, mid-range, like still a gamer-level card, but it's more of a mainstream-y rather than an enthusiast-class card, but it's using the same GPU with the same technology as the 680, the 690, and the 670. It's got... even the clock speeds are the same. Actually, let's see, do they have clock speeds on here? So the reference cards will have the same clock speeds as a GeForce GTX 670, with the only difference being a 192-bit memory bus as compared to a 256-bit memory bus on the GTX 670. So you've got 2 gigs of GDDR5 memory due to Nvidia's innovative memory controller that allows them to still get this nice even 2-gig number in spite of the memory bus, which would normally have limited them to an either a 1.5-gig memory configuration or a 3-gig memory configuration. You've also got a lot of technology that gets carried over from those, basically everything, from those higher-end cards, including GPU Boost, which dynamically adjusts the GPU clock speeds depending on the load that's being put on the card and how much power is being drawn from the card so that you're always getting the highest performance you can in the applications that demand it. Here, I've got some accessories. Sorry, I am going to keep going with the stuff on the box, but I want to start getting this card open here so that you guys can check it out because I am extremely excited about the GeForce 660 Ti and particularly the Power Edition from MSI due to their triple-overvoltage design. Here, I'll let you guys stare at the board a little bit with Slick's assistance while I talk about some of the other technology that's being carried over from previous edition cards. Here's a big one, Adaptive V-Sync. Adaptive V-Sync basically gives you the best of both worlds. When your frame rate goes above the refresh rate of your monitor, Adaptive V-Sync will turn V-Sync on, which will eliminate tearing, which is when you turn around and you see half of the image was drawn while you were looking over here and the other half is drawn while you were looking slightly over here, so they don't quite meet up in the middle or up here somewhere, and that's a big problem. What's great about Adaptive V-Sync is it turns it off as soon as you get at or below the refresh rate of the monitor. The benefit of that is that when you have V-Sync on, you have to be at an even multiple of... no, not a multiple, divisor, a factor, I think it's a factor of the refresh rate of the monitor, whatever, okay. That times something, has to multiply the refresh rate. So if you're at a refresh rate of 60 for your monitor, you have to run at 30 FPS as opposed to 45, so it'll knock you down to a lower frame rate, so what it does is it turns it off to prevent that from happening, so that's good stuff as well. GPU boost, ah yes, amazing performance per watt as well as class-leading idle power consumption, which to me is one of the most important things about it because even the most hardcore gamer still checks Facebook and email and doesn't necessarily game all the time, so having a video card that doesn't kick out a ton of heat and doesn't consume a ton of power when you're not actually playing video games is very, very important to me. You can have a look at the TwinFrozer Cooler while I check my notes. So you've got full support for NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround running off of a single card. You've got support for TXAA, so TXAA is basically a much better way of doing anti-aliasing, so NVIDIA has incorporated a variety of different approaches to get you significantly better image quality without necessarily the same level of performance hit that we've seen in the past. And what TXAA does is it offers a higher level of quality of filtering than has previously been achievable. Now not all games support it, but like any new technology, we will eventually see it continue to move forward. FXAA is of course high quality anti-aliasing, not quite the same as MSAA, but with a much lower performance hit compared to a more traditional anti-aliasing. So if you don't know what anti-aliasing is, Google is your friend, but we're going to focus on this card and other aspects of it for now. So TwinFrozer 4 Cooler, lots of different technologies. So you've got your dual fans, you've got your propeller blades, which with these coatings at the end actually reduce the amount of noise they make, as well as improve the amount of airflow that they push due to the design of the blade. So they've added dust repelling technology, which gets the fan to spin the opposite way and when it's first turned on to pull some of the dust out of the fins before it reverses direction and pushes air back through the fins. So this keeps dust from settling on the fins and means you won't have to clean your video card as often, if at all, using this technology. So TwinFrozer 4 Cooler, yeah, what else do we have to say about it? Ah, yes, superpipes. So these ones out here, the heat pipes that have to carry the heat furthest away from the GPU out to the very edges of the cooler, those ones are using thicker heat pipes, whereas the ones that are right over the GPU itself and aren't carrying heat very far are using thinner heat pipes. That way they're using the more expensive thicker heat pipes in the areas where you really have to work harder to move the heat away from the GPU and spread it out to the radiator, which covers almost the entire card. Speaking of things that cover almost the entire card, you can see there's a unisink right here, instead of putting it, you know, lots of gamers love backplates. See the plate that's covering almost the entirety of the card, including all the VRM, as well as the RAM modules. And see this fold right here? This gives the card a lot of rigidity. So lots of gamers love backplates because they can make the card look pretty slick and sexy, but there's a problem with backplates, and that is that as soon as you add a little bit more height to the back of the card, you are reducing the compatibility with multi-GPU configurations. A lot of the time you take two cards of the backplate, you try and put them side by side, and you don't try SLI or whatever other config you want, and you go, oh, all of a sudden your cards are kind of like, like this, away from each other because those backplates don't leave enough space. MSI's approach is to build in this unisink, which gives a lot of the benefits of the backplate, including cooling many of the components. You can see with their custom PC beat, all the components except for a couple memory modules are on the other side of the card. Okay, so you're getting the cooling benefit. Besides, you're getting the active cooling from the fan anyway. If anything, there should be more benefits to doing it this way. You're also getting that extra rigidity to the card. This card has almost no flex, so you get that same benefit that you'd get from a backplate, except that you're putting it on the front, and you still maintain a very clean look and all of that good stuff. It's just a matter of where they've put that plate of metal. So in terms of other physicality, the card, pretty much what you've come to expect. I mean, it's using the same GPU, most of the same technology as the 670 or 680, so you've got dual DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort out, again, supporting Nvidia 3D vision surround off of a single card. You've got two SLI fingers, meaning you're going to have support for at least three-way graphics card configurations, which is, again, very unexpected for what would normally be more of a mid-range gaming-level graphics card. PCI Express 3.0 is fully supported by this card. Two PCIe 6-pin power connectors. It's a very power-efficient card. In fact, I'm surprised they even need two of them to be perfectly blunt. Which leads us to the most important things about this card. So number one is something you can't really see that well, because there's nothing on the back of the card, and this heat spreader covers all of the PWM for the card. You can't really see anything, but it uses a 5 plus 2 phase power design compared to the 4 plus 2 phase power design of a reference card. That means better stability in overclocking, and in theory, better overclocks. Which leads us to the single most important thing about the power addition, and that is the fact that it features triple overvoltage. Triple overvoltage is MSI's sort of branding, marketing-speak thing for the ability to overvolt the core, the PLL, and the memory. Now, I'm going to let that sink in for a second. There won't be another GTX 660 Ti at launch that allows overvolting the core, which means that as long as you've got decent cooling on this card, this will be the 660 Ti that will overclock better than any other card. Now, this is only the unboxing. I haven't tested it yet, and I do have a power addition triple overvoltage card, and I have another one that I'm going to be testing head-to-head to find out if there's an actual benefit. Do you get higher boost clocks from using triple overvoltage versus from not using it? So I'm very excited to check that out, but I'm confident enough that we're going to see the results that I'm going to go ahead and say it now. You guys are going to want to use MSI Afterburner to overclock your GTX 660 Ti power addition with triple overvoltage, and if you want the most performance per dollar out of a 660 Ti, this will be the way to go. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the GTX 660 Ti power addition from MSI, and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. And I forgot to cover the DBI to VGA adapter, two dual Molex to 6-pin PCIe power connectors, and a quick user's guide, download of course the latest drivers from the NVIDIA website rather than using this disc, and I'll thank you for bearing with me when I forget things.