 Welcome to another Linus Tech Tips video card launch video. So this one is for the GeForce GTX 660 from Nvidia. We're going to be featuring the MSI Twin Frozr SKU. This is a 2GIG card and it has, as you can clearly see, their Twin Frozr 3 cooler. So the Twin Frozr 3 cooler has all of the features of a Twin Frozr 4 except for one. So I'm going to show you guys. It's got dual fans, of course. It has a super pipe, thick fat heat pipe keeps the card nice and cool. It has, oh okay, this is, don't do this at home kids. Okay, grounding first of course. Propeller blade fans, so that the shape as well as that coating on the tips makes it so that it does push more air. It's extremely quiet. You can see we're running a game right now and I'm going to get my, okay I was going to have you move the opposite direction. I'm going to stop talking and I want you to move really close to the card so you can see even running a game. It's like inaudible, you can't even hear the thing. But it's missing the dust removal tech where the fans counter spin the wrong way and remove some dust from the heat sink before it starts. So let's go into some of the details of the GPU itself. So this is using a GK106 core. Okay, this is just the box so there's nothing really that special here. GK106 core, it's a Kepler based GPU. So this is a huge improvement over last generation cards which are based on the Fermi architecture. So Kepler adds a whole bunch of stuff. Besides much better power consumption and better performance, Kepler also adds support, you know, well, okay, the older cards support it too. But innately for TXAA, FXAA, so these are additional anti-aliasing modes with FXAA being fantastic for lower performance cards but maintaining a certain level of visual quality. You've also got full support for adaptive v-sync and being a Kepler card you also have on the TI skew, so rather not on the TI, on the 660, you've got support for up to four displays out. So if you come back here and have a look, we've got two DVI ports, one HDMI and display port out which is going to give you three in Nvidia surround plus one auxiliary display to work with. Now the 660 only supports two-way SLI. So if you step up to a 660 TI, you have support for three-way SLI but the 660 because it's not based on the GK104 but rather based on the GK106 core only supports two-way SLI. It also has a 192-bit memory bus which is the same as the GTX 660 TI and what that means is Nvidia is using their unique technology in order to achieve their even memory amount so that's the two-gig memory amount versus what you'd normally see with a 192-bit bus which is either 1.5 gigs or three gigs. So that allows us to hit kind of a sweet spot and this brings me to one of the major points before we get into the performance of the card too much that I want to make versus its last generation contemporary, the GTX 560 TI. So these are the more price comparable cards necessarily than the 660 TI to the 560 TI would be. So this is a one gig card. You can buy two gig ones but the normal one is a one gig card and we observed, so check this out, so the 660 is getting around 100 FPS, this is an ultra quality and the Elder Scrolls, whatever it is, Skyrim around 80 FPS. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to alt tab out of this game and we saw some crazy results. So these results aren't done yet. I still have to do some more testing but check this out. So the 560 TI to the 660 is as much as a doubling in performance and hold on, I'm going to have to double check these numbers with the ones that I just ran. Okay, so that's a little bit different. See this is why I'm rerunning some of the numbers because they just plain didn't look right but check this out. So 560 TI is beaten by more than double by a GTX 660 in Skyrim. So what we're observing here is that the reason Nvidia has gone with that two gig frame buffer is that's the sweet spot right now where three gigs would potentially cost too much and not provide any additional benefit but a two gig frame buffer is going to be more than enough but save you some of the cost on the card so that you get more graphics power for cheaper. So we've had people suggest actually from our 660 TI video review that our 560 TI results were nerfed in some way but that's not true at all. What you are seeing is the fact that we are running on modern settings. So Crysis 2 is running at very high with the high res textures enabled. Skyrim is running at the ultra preset with the high res texture pack. Witcher 2 is running at very high preset with VSync on and Metro 2033 is just a super demanding game in the first place. So it shouldn't surprise us that much that these are games that at 1080p with high details are running out of room on that one gig frame buffer. So with all that in mind stay tuned for performance. Alright, so here I am in the home studio and I've finished all the benchmarking that needs to be done for this card. So we've, I think I've already covered enough about the technology itself. So here is the test platform and for a change I am going to take this powerpoint presentation. I'm going to put a link under the video review so you guys can actually download it and check out the graphs at your leisure. I'm going to make a habit of doing this in the future guys. So this is all run on a Core i7-3930 kit, 4 gigahertz, cool by Core 3H100. You can read the rest of the specs should you so desire. So let's go ahead and switch into play mode. First benchmark is Crysis 2 at 1080p at very high settings. So something you guys are going to notice, again these 560 Ti results, they are terrible. So we did not see very good results with the 560 Ti at all. The 660 Ti absolutely rocks it. So by about double the performance and really hangs with its bigger brother the 660 Ti, did I say 660 Ti? The 660 hangs with its big brother the 660 Ti and the 670 which were both very close. I think we get CPU limited once we hit around 95 FPS in this particular game. The 660 competes very well against its direct competition the 7870. So we see a pretty much a neck and neck race here guys. And our next benchmark is Battlefield 3. So here we see the GTX 660 performs pretty much again in line with the 7870, edging it out by about 4% which is outside the margin of error. So we're going to go ahead and call it a victory. But again legs behind its bigger brothers which is to be expected. Next benchmark, Skyrim. Skyrim was a bit of a mess overall just due to the fact that we become very CPU limited once we hit around that 100 FPS mark. So it's really hard for any of these cards to pull away from each other. However this is still a convincing victory for the 660 but it again loses to its bigger brother and this looked like a bit of an anomaly. So not sure what to make of that but don't mind it. Witcher 2. Once again we see the same pattern where these two cards are very competitive with each other. However we're going to call that a win for the 7870 and the 660 legs behind the 660Ti and the 670 which is to be expected because it's cheaper. Finally Metro 2033. See this is the one. They're all supposed to be aligned like this so that you can easily compare which cards perform in line with which other cards. So here we had these two cards perform very similarly. It looks like almost like a memory bandwidth bottleneck because you can see the 670 really pulls away and it doesn't have that 192 memory bus like these two cards both have and they both perform very similarly to the 7870 in this context. So thank you for checking out my video review of the MSI GeForce GTX 660 Non-Ti. This is the Twin Frozr Edition card. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips. More unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.