In about a week or two, the first Kepler-based mid-range graphics cards will officially launch, including the GeForce GTX 660 Ti model. EVGA's Signature Range edition was one of the first to surface, to which MSI's GeForce GTX 660 Ti Hawk Edition is now added, in threefold!
Typical of the graphics cards in the Hawk series is the large Twin Frozr cooler, which is of the fourth generation on the new GTX 660 Ti model. The overclocked video chip, which according to the GPU-Z screenshot features 1344 CUDA cores and a 1020 MHz clock frequency, should be kept sufficiently cool to provide users with some additional overclocking headroom. In Boost mode, the GPU speed is elevated to 1098 MHz. At 1502 MHz, the memory frequency has been left untouched. It's interesting that the card appears to have 3 GB of GDDR5 memory, thus far all models we've come across had either 1.5 or 2 GB.
Other specifications, such as the 192-bit memory interface, are identical to the leaked information. Two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors are present on the Hawk card, but it's still unclear whether the second connector will also be present on Nvidia's reference model. It's not unlikely that MSI has simply provided the extra connector to boost the card's overclockability.
A last nice touch is that three of these MSI cards were tested in an SLI configuration, netting a total of 18731 3DMark Performance points. An Extreme score of 2862 points was also obtained, seemingly with a single card. Unfortunately, the only other detail of the test setup is the Core i7 3930K processor, clocked at 3.2 GHz. The overclocked Hawk cards score quite similar to a reference GeForce GTX 670 model.
Perhaps the most important question of all remains unanswered for now, what will the GeForce GTX 660 TI cost? Rumour has it that the card will retail right around $300 (£192).
Images courtesy of VideoCardz
