Introduction

While we're still about a week and a half away from the upcoming NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 660 officially launching, we got a chance to have a look at what kind of performance we can expect from the new model when it came to its reference clock speeds. As always the next step is to look at the overclocking side of things to see just what we can expect out of it.

Like when we looked at the GTX 660 Ti overclocking ability pre-launch we don't have the ability to adjust voltage at the moment. We're not sure if it's going to be like that for all GTX 660 based video cards or over the next week or two we'll get an updated version of MSI Afterburner that will bring with it the ability to adjust voltages.

There's not a whole lot of detail we need to go into so we'll get into the swing of things pretty quickly. Below we'll take a quick look at how we went with the overclocking side of things. Once we've done that we'll quickly cover our testbed, the cards that we'll be using in our graphs today and then we'll just get into the performance side of things to see what the overclock we managed to achieve today does for overall performance.

With numbers that currently sit extremely close to the GTX 580 and HD 7870, it will be interesting to see what kind of overclock we manage to achieve while also see what kind of boost the overclock gives us. So without going on much more let's quickly cover the specification side of things before we get into the test system setup and the benchmarks.

Specifications

Out of the box a reference clocked GTX 660 is going to carry with it a default core clock of 980MHz which via boost comes in at 1033MHz. As for the 2GB of GDDR5 that comes in at 6008MHz QDR.

Today we managed to get our core running at 1165MHz via boost while we pushed the 2GB of GDDR5 up to 6192MHz QDR. This isn't a bad boost at all considering we have no options when it comes to voltage and it will be interesting to see what kind of performance increase we see.