News - NVIDIA rolls out GeForce GTX 660 OEM without fanfare

[HEXUS]

And it appears to be based on the ever-popular GK104 die.

Read more.

[Willzzz]

Still on GK104!

Different specs to what have been suggested for the retail version.
This sounds better than the alleged retail specs, which would be odd, but maybe the old rumours were false.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

GeForce GTX 660 OEM Specifications released. Retail to be based on GK106?



There is blurred picture of what is supposedly a GK106 based retail card. AFAIK,supposedly the person who did the leak has been accurate in the past.

[scaryjim]

What I find odd is that a smaller Kepler die exists for the GT640 - a 384 core part w. 128bit memory interface. So why have they introduced a bottom end chip and a top end chip, but still nothing in the middle? Very confusing...

[Jimbo75]

Well GK107 is a joke and I'm beginning to wonder if they masked its real performance by saddling it with DDR3

The obvious answer would be...GK106 wasn't good good enough. Nvidia chips historically don't scale down very well and this is probably why GK106 was canned. Nvidia won't release anything that "loses" vs it's supposed competitor, and if GK106 couldn't beat the 7870 with similar die size (which seems very likely - it probably couldn't beat the 7850), then they'd fall back on their larger die size strategy in order to keep their mindshare.

[scaryjim]

Well GK107 is a joke and I'm beginning to wonder if they masked its real performance by saddling it with DDR3

Theoretically there's an OEM version with GDDR5 - would be interesting to see what performance was like. Certainly Nvidia's low-mid-range cards since 9600GT have been poor, gaining little performance if any between generations. It's always been down to the GTX x60 and higher to push performance. Although the same could be said of AMD; the 4770, 5770/6770 and 7770 have shown only minimal performance gains. It's almost like both companies hit a level of performance that they decided was "enough" for a particular market segment, and haven't bothered improving at that end of the market since...

[edvinasm]

If it outperforms GTX 570 and goes on a par with HD 7850 and is priced at €200 for ASUS version I am getting it. Otherwise I might opt for GTX 570 since it is supported by Adobe and is a decent performer still.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

If it outperforms GTX 570 and goes on a par with HD 7850 and is priced at €200 for ASUS version I am getting it. Otherwise I might opt for GTX 570 since it is supported by Adobe and is a decent performer still.

You might find compute performance of the GTX570 to be greater than a GTX660 non-TI.

[HalloweenJack]

now then - nvidia have done this before - used 1 gpu for OEM and anoher for retail yet having the same names (GT 440)