MSI GeForce GTX 660 HAWK 2GB Review

Review index:

7 – GTX 660 HAWK Overclocking

MSI GeForce GTX 660 HAWK - Burn-in test - MSI Kombustor

With a factory overclocking of more than 100MHz, that will be hard to push the GK106 GPU further. I managed to add a small +40Mhz and +50mV to the GPU with the power target set to 114% TDP (do not forget to set it!). With this settings the GPU overclocking is stable under FurMark 1.10.2, TessMark 0.3.0, Unigine Heaven 2.1 and 3DMark11. I also tried to overclock the memory but I didn’t manage to overclock both memory and GPU (not even 20MHz to the memory… I’ll try again later). Alone, I overclocked the memory with an extra +500MHz double rate or +250MHz real speed to get 1752MHz real speed. With this extra memory ocing, the 3DMark11 P score increased by 80 points: from P7172 (+0MHz) to P7252 (+500MHz).

MSI GeForce GTX 660 HAWK - Overclocking params

And since we are in overclocking part, let’s see the advantage of the voltage check points. I connected a multimeter on the GPU voltage check point. At idle, the multimeter displayed 0.857V while GPU Shark, GPU-Z and MSI Afterburner displayed 0.850V.

MSI GeForce GTX 660 HAWK - voltage check points

Under load it was another story. The multimeter displayed 1.xxxV while GPU Shark, GPU-Z and MSI Afterburner displayed 1.175V.

MSI GeForce GTX 660 HAWK - voltage check points




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5 thoughts on “MSI GeForce GTX 660 HAWK 2GB Review”

  1. Licaon_Kter

    Unigine Heaven has a lower score under Linux ONLY when using AA, it’s a known thing and they did not bother to fix it, so yeah, comparisons are useless, try without AA, with Tess: Extreme and they’re on the same level.

  2. JeGX Post Author

    Thanks Licaon_Kter, I’ll do again the Heaven benchmark without AA. It’s time I release my new tests under linux and win….

  3. JeGX

    I just tested with the following settings:

    – 1920×1080 fullscreen
    – no AA
    – 16x aniso.
    – shaders: high

    – Tessellation: extreme
    Windows: 50.7 FPS, Scores: 1278
    Linux: 36.3 FPS, Scores: 915

    – Tessellation: normal
    Windows: 65.9 FPS, Scores: 1660
    Linux: 49.3 FPS, Scores: 1243…

    wtf?

  4. Licaon_Kter

    On my plain GTX460/700/3600, tested with the same settings for Heaven 3.0:
    -1920×1080 fullscreen
    -no AA
    -16x aniso.
    -shaders: high
    -tess: extreme
    -Linux 310.14 / Windows 310.33 & 306.97

    Linux: 23.4 / 589 / 12.1 / 59.3
    WOGL: 23.4 / 588 / 11.9 / 61.2
    WDX11: 24.6 / 619 / 12.5 / 66.6

    That’s just ~5% difference…

    Either you forgot to disable VSync (as it’s enabled by default on Linux) or there is something else at fault, like your DE/WM compositor, etc.

  5. JeGX Post Author

    I tested with Heaven 2.1, maybe that could explain the difference. I’ll try with Heaven 3.0 as you did.

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