EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti FTW Signature 2 Review + SLI
Published by Christian Ney on 13.05.13Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| The GeForce GTX 660 Ti FTW Signature 2 from EVGA is
a very nice piece of hardware. The factory overclocking the card comes with makes it the third highest overclocked GTX 660 Ti you can find across the Europe. It brings some extra performance compared to the reference clocked cards but we would have liked to see the memory being overclocked too as a FTW series card. The FTW Signature 2 is very expensive, you can find it at a starting price of 270 €, 37 € more than the cheapest GTX 660 Ti according to Geizhals.at. The ASUS DirectCU 2 Top is as expensive a better cooling and components wise. But the EVGA cards have something more the other manufacturers don't offer, EVGA Extended Warranty, EVGA Step-Up Program and EVGA's Current Promotions we described on page 3 which make the card very interesting and more attractive. Furthermore the bundle is more furnished than the ASUS one. |
- Bundle
- Warranty - Design - Factory Overclocking |
- No factory overclocking on the memory | |
| Cooling / Noise Level | + | - | |
| GPU Temperatures were really good with a maximum of 78°C under heavy FurMark load with the fans locked at 30 % fan speed. The noise levels are good too at 30 % (noiseless) and 50 % (Silent) fan speed but at full speed the Signature 2 cooler makes more noise than nVidia's stock cooler. Anyway unless you have tropical ambient temperature the fans won't go that high. After one hour gaming BattleField 3 the maximum fan speed measured was 50 % and GPU temperature 75°C. So in the end the Signature 2 cooler does a really good job though it's a bit worse than ASUS' DCU II. We also really like it's full nickel plated design that makes it really good looking. |
- Noiseless in idle
- Silent under load |
||
| Performance | + | - | |
| Thanks to the factory overclocking, the FTW
Signature 2 is about 5.0 % faster on average in games than the same card
with reference clocks and 2.0 % faster than the ASUS DirectCU II Top.
Despite the later has 13 MHz higher factory GPU clocks the EVGA card is
faster which is strange one might think, here is the explanation: First of all our stock clocked GTX 660 Ti has quite an impressive Boost, on average the card was clocking itself around 1'150 MHz, 170 MHz away from the typical boost clock. In the case of the ASUS card we measured an average of 1'202 MHz. Then comes the EVGA card with an impressive average boost clock of 1'267 MHz! No kidding, while gaming the GPU was almost always at 1'267 MHz. Unfortunately we didn't have any reference PCB GTX 660 Ti for our test so we have its power consumption values. Meanwhile we can say that the power consumption in both idle and load is good. In idle we measured 57 Watts for the entire system, 3 Watts less than with the ASUS card. Under load it the other way around, the FTW S2 eats about 9 Watts more. The difference rely on the PCB and the power design that are completely different. For the record the DirectCU 2 has a beefed up digital power design and a completely reworked PCB. |
- Performance/Watt
- Power Consumption in idle - Power Consumption under load |
||
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| If you are looking for very good GTX 660 Ti with flexible options such as an extended warranty or the Step-Up program and a lot of free games in bundle, this is it! | - High-End Gaming | ||
| We gave the GeForce GTX 660 Ti FTW Signature 2 from EVGA the perfect award of 5 out of 5 stars. | |||
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Author: Christian Ney c.ney@ocaholic.ch
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