NVIDIA Prepares GeForce GTX 660 Graphics Card

If you were wondering when you'd get a mainstream graphics cards from NVIDIA, you might not have to wait much longer.

Swedish website SweClockers claims to have discovered when the GeForce GTX 660 video controller will be formally launched. No precise day was mentioned, but the report did say that we should be looking at late summer, between July and August. That's not as soon as we were hoping, but we'll have to take what we can get. The specifications of the product are predominantly guesswork at this stage, as is the price, but they should be more or less accurate. The GK106 will act as the heart of the card, with its four SMX clusters and 768 CUDA cores. 2 GB of GDDR5 will back up said chip, operating on an interface of either 192 or 256 bits, probably the latter.

The Santa Clara, California-based company should eventually have a GTX 650 and maybe even low-end, possibly low profile cards out and selling. There probably won't be very many customers for them though, considering the existence of integrated GPUs in the majority of consumer CPUs nowadays. AMD's accelerated processing units (APUs) are a particularly painful thorn, since they have mainstream-level GPUs, not throw-away circuits.

That's neither here nor there though. NVIDIA doesn't need to worry about such things overmuch. Instead, it would do well to choose an accessible price for the GTX 660. SweClockers hints at 2,500 Swedish kronors, which translates into roughly $350, or 278 Euro. The sum is not in line with previous beliefs that the tag will fall in the $299-$329 range, but it does include VAT, so there is some justification. Keep your eyes and ears peeled in July and August and remember: NVIDIA might use the Ti branding on the GeForce GTX 660, as it did for the GTX 560 Ti.

Posted in: Hardware, Preview