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From the moment we discovered what the street price of the GTX660 was going to be, we were (a) concerned that it was too close to the GTX670 and (b) that it would tumble at some stage – causing worry among the early adopters who might have saved a wad of cash if they'd waited a few weeks. KitGuru polishes off it's trusty listening glass and illicitly accesses ‘janitor cupboards next to boardrooms' up and down the land.
While a lot of attention has recently been focused on AMD's efforts to re-energise its graphics products with aggressive price moves, the killer threat to the GTX660 range seems to come from within.
A quick check on Google's pricing shows that most of the GTX670 cards are in the same price space as the top end GTX660 Ti cards. Which is bad news for the GTX660 Ti, because when you benchmark the GTX670 then it comes out significantly ahead of the GTX660 Ti.
For added pressure, Google reveals that stores like BT are able to sell the overclocked version of the GTX660 (i.e. running at 915MHz), for just £227. With the recently benchmarked GTX660 likely to launch around the £200 mark, that doesn't leave a lot of room for manoeuvre.
Yesterday, we spoke with a couple of influential UK resellers and they were both of the same opinion, ‘The GTX 670 is a killer of a card, sales of the initial GTX660 Ti have been very sluggish and there's no reason to expect the slower (non-Ti) GTX660 to do any better'.
For the 660 cards to do well, it would take a major software launch (for example, Doom 4 or Crysis 3) where a lot of attention in the code was focused on something that the 660 technology does significantly better/faster than AMD.
KitGuru says: Without a specific game launch or special promotion for 2012 around the GTX660 (Borderlands coupons do not count), AMD's series of price drops and the on-going popularity of the GTX670 – it doesn't see as if Jen Hsun Huang and his team will be able to swell the GTX660's sales figures. We reckon a GTX660 around the £150 mark will do it, but is that something nVidia would be comfortable being pushed in to?
