Meet the Gigabyte Windforce GeForce GTX 660 Ti OC

Gigabyte’s products are embraced in India. Not only has Gigabyte set up an excellent distribution channel in the country, their efficient products combined with good after-sales support have earned them a reputation. We thus picked up the Gigabyte GeForce 660 GTX Ti OC for this review. Availability of this card is superb across the country. The current market price is approximately Rs. 20,000.

Getting deeper into the design of this specific card, we notice that this is a fully custom design, compared to the semi-custom GTX 600 Ti variants of Zotac, Palit, and MSI. What we mean by a fully custom design is, the presence of a custom cooler and a custom PCB instead of the reference PCB. The changes made by Gigabyte are no overkill, as they do make a noticeable positive impact on how the card performs all around. The Gigabyte GTX 660 Ti has better VRM circuitry than its counterparts, increasing the power target of the card from 134W to 141W. The GK104 chipset is power-deprived in general, and this is amplified by the missing ROP in the GTX 660 Ti, so this change is welcome. The wattage difference might be small, but the performance increase is noticeable.

Gigabyte markets this product with Windforce Advanced Turbulence Technology. Nothing fancy in here, but definitely practical. The Windforce cooler is a 2-fan cooler, with aluminum heat sink fins attached to two 100-mm fans. The design of the card looks slightly awkward, with the length of the fan longer than that of the card itself (8.4″). Heat is transferred from two thick copper pipes at the base. This design incorporates a separate heat sink for the VRM section of the card.