GTX 660 TI

[Dirck]

Hello, I am ordering a new system next week from AVAdirect. It will be used primarily for Photoshop CS6/Lightroom 4 but will also be used for Premiere Pro CS6.

I'm ordering the following components but am wondering about a mid -range video card. Would the GTX 660 ti be a good choice?

ASUS 9X79 Pro

I7 3930K

32GB Crucial Ram

128GB Samsung 830 SSD

1TB WD Caviar Black HD

(2) 2 TB WD Caviar Black HD

Windows 7 Professional 64bit

Thanks for any help.

Sharon

[Baz R]

the memory is best to be 1.35v for stability if OC.

also I would spend the little extra and go for a gtx 670.

Baz

[Harm_Millaard]

The 660 Ti has great specs, but I have not yet seen benchmark results. Well, it is completely new, so it will take some time for results to appear, but from the looks of it, it is indeed a very nice card. It would be a good combination with the rest of your components.

[Baz R]

Difference in Memory interface and bandwith.  & GPU Rop compared with 670

Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti 2GB Specifications

	Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti 2GB	Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 2GB	Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 2GB	Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 4GB
GPU
Codename	GK104	GK104	GK104	2 x GK104
Base Clock	915MHz	915MHz	1,006MHz	915MHz
Boost Clock	980MHz	980MHz	1,058MHz	980MHz
Stream Processors	1344	1344	1536	1536
Layout	7 SMs, 4 GPCs	7 SMs, 4 GPCs	8 SMs, 4 GPCs	2 x 8 SMs, 4 GPCs
Rasterisers	4	4	4	2 x 4
Tesselation Units	7	7	8	2 x 8
Texture Units	112	112	128	2 x 128
ROPs	24	32	32	2 x 32
Transistors	3.54 Billion	3.54 Billion	3.54 Billion	2 x 3.54 Billion
Die Size	294mm²	294mm²	294mm²	2 x 294mm²
Process	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm
Memory
Amount	2GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5	2 x 2GB GDDR5
Frequency	1.5GHz (6GHz effective)	1.5GHz (6GHz effective)	1.5GHz (6GHz effective)	1.5GHz (6GHz effective)
Interface	192-bit	256-bit	256-bit	2 x 256 bit
Bandwidth	144 GB/sec	192 GB/sec	192 GB/sec	2 x 192 GB/sec
Card Specifications
Power Connectors	2 x 6-pin PCI-E	2 x 6-pin PCI-E	2 x 6-pin PCI-E	2 x 8-pin PCI-E
Stock Card Length	240mm	240mm	257mm	279mm
TDP	150W	170W	195W	300W
Typical Street Price	£250	£300	£400	£840

[Dirck]

Thanks for the quick responses. I have been reading this forum for a while and it has been most helpful.

Sharon

[Steven L. Gotz]

I agree that you might want to go with the GTX670.  I did, and I am quite pleased. I went with the 4GB in case I can get my hands on some seriously large and complex video - like RED.

Having said that, I was in Fry's the other day and they were practically giving away the GTX580 - which is a decent card. If money is a big issue, then going back a generation sometimes works out OK.

[RjL190365]

Thanks for the info on the GTX 600 series GPUs. It appears that the GTX 660 Ti would be slightly faster than a GTX 560 Ti, but its memory throughput would fall just shy of a GTX 570 or GTX 560 Ti 448 (as its memory interface is only 192 bits wide instead of 256 bits on the full-blown GK104 GPUs). The GTX 660 Ti also has eight of its Raster Operator Units (ROPs) disabled in comparison to the GTX 670.

[Harm_Millaard]

While I agree that the 670 is faster than the 660 Ti, this statement by Sharon:

It will be used primarily for Photoshop CS6/Lightroom 4 but will also be used for Premiere Pro CS6.

led me to refrain from mentioning the 670. For PS/LR the 660 TI is more than adequate and I wonder if the secondary purpose, PR has suffcient weight to justify the extra cost.

[Guest]

The #1 stat is oddly named, considering those aren't Radeon cards.  By "stream processors" they mean CUDA cores.

Given the price difference and the spec difference, comparing that to past differences in actual benchmarks in Pr with earlier cards, you can expect the % in price to almost exactly mean the same % drop in performance.  The 680 actually looks a bit in line with that too but the 690 is well into luxury surcharge land.

[Personal comments deleted]

Don't overclock your video system unless you like spending more money on cooling instead of a better chip, ending up with corrupted final projects, and blue screening in the middle of rendering and encoding.  Of course, overclocking 4% won't do that, 20% would, but why bother wasting time finding that point? Overclocking is for hobbyists who want to make their PC run faster for fun.  There's a reason professionals don't typically do it, and the main reason is they like their system to actually work and live for 3+ years lol.

I've overclocked a pair of Radeon Sapphire Extremely Edition 5830's from 800MHz to 1040Mhz and 990Mhz to run a bitcoin mining rig and got it up to 633 Megahashes per second but if you did pretty much anything else in the system, the graphics driver would crash.  "Oh wait, I have to start over. It crashed" is not something you want to tell your boss at a video editing company though   I'm not saying you can't get it to run stable, I'm saying it's hard on your system in the long term and it's very difficult to find a flawless level of overclocking that never has memory corruption or blue screening problems.  Once you do find it, prepare to change it 6 months later when your motherboard and PSU capacitors start to wear down a little and your system starts crashing at OC levels that were previously stable.

I have a system in my shop with a wimpy little GT440 in it but I got it from 810MHz to 1000Mhz on air at low fan speed at 43Celsius!  Amazing!  But, the graphics driver would crash after an average of 30 minutes of Rainbow 6 Vegas 2.  I turned it down to 950MHz and it seems to be running better.  I also got the onboard FSB on the AMD AM2 4800+ to 220Mhz so it's 2.75Ghz instead of 2.5 and it benched 0.2 higher on the WEI rating!  Woohoo! But if I go to 225, as soon as I move the mouse after booting, it blue screens So is 220 really a stable level?  I don't know.  I do know I don't have 30 hours to test it properly though.  So my point is, for a video editing system, 55 minutes into a 60 minute encoding job is NOT a good time to find out that your overclocking settings were a little more than your system could handle You can run Prime95 for 5 hours as a burn in test and still have your system crash while editing a video later.  Just stay at or very near stock speeds and you won't have any headaches.

[Dirck]

Harm, you are correct. The vast majority of what we do is stlll images. I do want to be able to produce short videos for clients, but I want to keep costs down.

VHC-CO-IT, thank you, I don't plan on overclocking anything. Looking at these benchmarks on Tom's Hardware, the 660 seems to do pretty well  http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-660-ti-benchmark-review,3279-15.html

I also noticed that the radeon cards are much better for image processing but they aren't included in the approved graphic's card list for Premiere Pro. Rats!

Sharon

[RjL190365]

In this case, Sharon, you will have to compromise.

Which is more important to you? Still image processing performance or video rendering (not to be confused with encoding) performance?

[Dirck]

Definitely still image processing. But maybe I'm confused - if I got a radeon card, would I be able to use Premiere Pro?

Sharon

[RjL190365]

Sharon,

Yes, you can use a Radeon with Premiere Pro CS6 - but you'll have to live with the editor being locked into the MPE software-only mode. This can increase render (as opposed to encode) times by a factor of 10 or more versus an otherwise comparably performing GeForce GPU with MPE GPU acceleration enabled.

[Dirck]

That would be awful - I'll stick with Geforce. Thanks!

Sharon

[jamesp2]

"Which is more important to you? Still image processing performance or video rendering (not to be confused with encoding) performance?"

Is there any actual evidence that video rendering is measurably faster with a 670 or80 as opposed to a 660 TI; or whether, in the course of the daily workflow, which usually doesn't include exporting to other formats, there will be any noticeable difference?

(Of the handful of 660 TI card reporting results at PPBMS, they show about the same variation of MPE acceleration as the 680s and 670s.)

Thanks.

[Guest]

Yeah, Radeon cards (and Firepro lol) do pretty much nothing for Premiere other than processing certain particular OpenCL operations faster.  It's not like a Radeon product wouldn't run Premier but it wouldn't really help much.  Really, Adobe focused on CUDA which is strictly Nvidia.  A really dumpy CUDA card like a 440 or whatever is 8x faster than two 8-core Xeon server chips at rendering CUDA-friendly effects (according to that one website those other people keep obsessively link to because they own it).

I don't know how nobody mentioned this yet but I'm 99% sure that CS4 and everything after it supported CUDA for certain photoshop filters.  I have no idea which ones but let's take noise reduction for example.  On my i5 PC with 8GB of CL7 1333 memory, it still takes about 2-3 seconds to do a noise reduction filter on an entire 12MP photo.  That's in CS3.  If i had CS4, my GTS450 would render it so quickly I wouldn't even see a progress bar if it was a CUDA-capable filter.  So even for Photoshop, I wouldn't even touch an AMD card.

Also, Nvidia made some pretty cool free plugins for photoshop.

[Baz R]

VHC-CO-IT

Before you make comments about igonoring other members, just look at the facts first. I only mentioned an option as do other members when giving advise.

Baz