Just as with the GTX 660 Ti, Tweaktown.com managed to get their hands on the upcoming GTX 660 (without any support from Nvidia, but we already know that story) from one of the AIB partners and publish a full review ahead of the official launch.
The upcoming GK106 based Nvidia GTX 660 has already been detailed including a performance level in Futuremark's 3DMark 11 and it appears that it actually performs identically to AMD's HD 7870. In case you missed it, the GTX 660 is based on Nvidia's 28nm GK106 GPU, features 960 CUDA cores, 980MHz base and 1033 Boost GPU clocks and comes with 2GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 6008MHz and paired up with a 192-bit memory interface.
According to our info, Nvidia actually places the GTX 660 as a direct competitor to the Radeon HD 7850 rather than the HD 7870, but we are yet to see a precise price other than sub-$300 price point. Currently, the HD 7870 GHz Edition can be found for as low as US $229.99 with rebate and GTX 660 will have a hard time to beat that price.
As noted, in most tests and games the performance ends up very close to the HD 7870. The GTX 660 is a pretty decent graphics card, at least according to this early review, but not a deal breaker, so it will eventually come down to the price. Of course, we will have to wait for the 12th of September as Nvidia can easily change the price at any point in time.
You can check out the Tweaktown review here.