ZOTAC GTX 660 2GB Review

Performance 

The ZOTAC GTX 660 delivers really good performance and easily manages to blow past the GTX 560 Ti and the HD 6950 2GB. In fact, it’s even faster than the GTX 570, which is more expensive than the GTX 660. Except for Dirt 3, where AMD cards have an upper hand, the card manages some impressive frame rates, especially in games like Battlefield 3 at Full HD resolution and all the DX11 goodness turned on. ZOTAC’s offering also ran incredibly silent throughout the benchmarking process and the temperatures were in check at all times. The card idles at 44 degrees Celsius and when stressed (using FurMark), doesn’t breach 57 degrees Celsius.

3DMark 11

3DMark is a computer benchmarking tool created and developed by Futuremark Corporation to determine the performance of a computer's 3D graphics rendering and CPU workload handling capabilities. The latest version makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11, including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. We used the ‘Performance’ preset for this benchmark.

Battlefield 3

Battlefield 3 is a first-person shooter developed by EA Digital Illusions CE and is based on the new Frostbite 2 game engine. The game only supports DX10 and DX11, which enables enhanced in-game destruction with Destruction 3.0, creating more refined physics than its predecessor and quasi-realtime radiosity using Geometrics' Enlighten technology. The game is a visual treat and a nightmare for graphics cards, which makes it perfect for our test. We used the ‘Ultra High’ preset, Post AA: High, Blur: Full, Field of View: 90, Level: ‘Fear no Evil’.