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Quick EVGA GeForce 660Ti question....

whitelight1985

whitelight1985

whitelight1985

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22 Dec 2012
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Hey there, I have quite an old mobo - (Nvidia EVGA nForce 78i SLI) and I'm seriously considering buying the EVGA GeForce GTX 660Ti as an upgrade. Would anybody be able to tell me if everything would be compatible between the two?

I know the AMD cards are better value, but I might be interested in doing SLI in the future so would like to stick to Nvidia. I'm going to have to find the physical specifications to make sure that it'll actually fit in my case, but my old GPU was a GeForce 8800GTX which was quite a hefty card so I'm sure that it will be fine.

My last question (having never installed a GPU before) is, since my old GPU has essentially died (artifacts on screen, wont boot windows) if I remove it and plug in this new one, will I have difficulties.. as wont it be trying to run from my 8800GTX drivers?? I'm rubbish at this stuff, thanks for the help! ;)
 
If your intersted in doing SLI I would not reccomend the 660TI because of the limitations put on memory bandwidth. Either go 670 or ATI :)
 
Are you running a 780a? or 790i?

I would go to EVGA and look through bios updates and make sure they mention Kepler before buying anything. Sounds to me like you have a (now defunct) Nforce chipset and they're notoriously dodgy at supporting new videocards.
 
ALXAndy said:
If you are running an Nforce chipset then I can promise you that no matter what CPU you have it will bottleneck the pants off of a pair of 660tis and even a single 670.
Click to expand...

Not knowing much about SLI, can I ask why Nforce would cause an issue with bandwidth/bottleneck.

I've been thinking about the possibility of SLI for physX and 3D Vision, this has kind of made me think of what I'm missing, or need to consider.

Sorry for the interjection!
 
And SkodaMart has it! After reading the reviews I think that card would be perfect. As stated I think that anything more powerful, ie. 660Ti or equivalent would be pointless due to bottlenecking. I dont have the funds for a full upgrade right now but I think this + RAM would be a great stop-gap. As long as it plays battlefield 3 and (hopefully) Company of heroes 2 I'll be happy!
 
snips86x said:
Not knowing much about SLI, can I ask why Nforce would cause an issue with bandwidth/bottleneck.

I've been thinking about the possibility of SLI for physX and 3D Vision, this has kind of made me think of what I'm missing, or need to consider.

Sorry for the interjection!
Click to expand...

As per the other thread he is using a dated chipset. IIRC the very last Nforce chipset was an AMD one, so you may just possibly get away with it if you were using say an 1100t or something clocked to heck.

The issue is that he is more than likely using an old core 2 duo or quad and even with a huge overclock the technology of those CPUs is not man enough for something like Kepler (especially a fast Kepler).

A 660ti wouldn't cause too many issues with something like a late core 2 quad clocked up to near 4ghz but any sort of SLI configuration or very fast single card would end up bottlenecked by the aging CPU.
 
You're right Andy, I bought one of the first quad cores, thought it might last me a few years, which it has in fairness. One last question - None of you know the length of this 660 card do you? I cant find it ANYWHERE on the web, including the KFA2 website and want to make sure that it'll fit into my tower, my 8800GTX JUST squeezed in and that's about 25cm in length... No use buying it and then finding out I don't have enough space!
 
Nvidia is the best place to look for dimensions. Stock cards 'made' by any company are not actually made by them at all.. They simply take delivery and then slap stickers on them.

The 660/ti should be the same size as the 670 which in both cases would be smaller than a 8800gtx. However you should definitely check if you are getting a custom cooled card as they are more often than not bigger than the stock variant.
 
Yes it was a rough guess. If you want to be a pedant then 9" is exactly 22.86 centimeters which is still shorter than a 8800gtx.
 
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