Massman Posted September 17, 2012 Share Posted September 17, 2012 Hey guys, I've recently been to the MSI office to test the new GTX660 graphics card. Originally I wanted to do the same style of review as I did with the 7870 Hawk so include all the mods, bioses and ln2 results, but it turned out to be a regular test. Mainly because the vGPU IC that is used (NCP5395) is not that easy to mod (click) and because there's no extreme OC bios available. As some of you might know, Nvidia has full control over the xtreme oc bioses. Vendors have to request an extreme oc bios from Nvidia and especially with low-end and mainstream cards that's not always easy. Once an extreme oc bios is available, I'll update this thread with the XOC results for sure! Pictures System Details - Intel Core i7 3960X C2 (ES) - MSI Big Bang-XPower II (bios V1.4) - Kingston HyperX Genesis KHX2400C11D3/2GX (4x 2GB) - MSI Geforce GTX 660 Twin Frozr - Enermax Revolution 87+ - Windows 7 64-bit (Chinese!) - Forceware 306.23 Results: Overview Results: 1x GPU Stock Results: 2x GPU Stock Results: 1x GPU OC (+100/+400) Results: 2x GPU OC (+50/+300) Conclusive lines Overall, I'm not all too displeased with this card. It's an okay mainstream card with mainstream performance. Being primarily an overclocker, I must say I'm a little disappointed by the lack of proper voltage control. Afterburner did not work correctly during my testing, but even if it would work it would still only provide the voltage range Nvidia allows for the GTX660. The Vgpu controller, NCP5395, has no I2C support. That means no software can be used to increase the voltage beyond stock. You will need to do the hardmod, which also is not as easy as it should(?) be. The driver used also had some stability issues in the 3DMark Vantage benchmark. The benchmark would crash when not being the first application opened after a reboot. When overclocked, SLI would always fail. This is a driver issue and should be resolved in next releases. As said, overall I'm definitely not disappointed, but also not extatic about this graphics card. It's mainstream, so delivers mainstream performance with mainstream overclocking capability. I might retest this card once new drivers are out and if I had the courage to start modding the NCP5395 . 'Till the next time! Addendum: About the award: MMB+ stands for Meaningless Marketer Bonus Plus (meaningless refering to the award, not the marketer!). The award has no value outside this forum and is not related to the product quality in any way. It's merely to please the person who gives me a kit to test and help him/her to show an award to their boss. This way, me not giving a damn about awards will never harm anyone in terms of yearly bonus. If you want to know how the product really is, read the thread and read other reviews. So, seriously, this award is pretty meaningless. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xtreme Addict Posted September 17, 2012 Share Posted September 17, 2012 NVP5395 bunny... so we are waiting for Hawk Nice pics, you had really great fun and honest final words, I like it. BTW I remember Gigabyte sending those 275 SOC modded by "factory" to overclockers lol Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TaPaKaH Posted September 17, 2012 Share Posted September 17, 2012 what? a review and no 10/10 rating + award given? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Massman Posted September 17, 2012 Author Share Posted September 17, 2012 NVP5395 bunny... so we are waiting for Hawk Nice pics, you had really great fun and honest final words, I like it. BTW I remember Gigabyte sending those 275 SOC modded by "factory" to overclockers lol Yeah. The NCP5395 has VID settings, so if you have a chip with I2C that controls the VID it's quite easy . what? a review and no 10/10 rating + award given? Fixed! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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