Posted on Thursday, August 23 2012 @ 21:38 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Details about the OEM version of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 660
have hit the web. This cheaper, cut-down version is the first Kepler graphics card to have a TDP of 130W. The OEM edition cuts the number of CUDA cores from 1344 to 1152 and the number of texture units from 112 to 96. The clockspeed also takes a hit from 915MHz to 832MHz and the boost is limited to 888MHz instead of 980MHz.
The OEM cards include GDDR5 memory on the same - sadly limiting - 192-bit bus as their bigger brother, but running at 5.8GHz rather than the 6GHz-and-change of the Ti model. There's also no 2GB version available, with OEMs given the choice of cheaping out on a 1.5GB model or wowing buyers with big numbers by packing 3GB of GDDR5 graphics RAM into their systems.
It's not all bad news, of course: the GK104 is the same 28nm TSMC-manufactured part as found on the Ti, albeit with some hardware disabled - and that has a benefit in reduced power draw, with the GeForce GTX 660 OEM given an official thermal design profile of 130W to the GeForce GTX 660 Ti's 150W. That latter could be of quite some interest to system builders: no other Kepler card comes in at less than 150W [EDIT: except the power-sipping 65W GT 640 and its OEM-only GT 645 counterpart] and the GeForce GTX 660 OEM simplifies wiring by requiring only a single PCI Express power connector.
