It hasn’t been a long time since the launch of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 660 Ti, a graphics card which managed to impress us immensely, packing some serious horsepower into a small frame, and carrying a rather nice price tag that shamed the GTX 670. To date, nothing in Nvidia’s Kepler stable matched up against AMD’s mid-range Radeon 7870 and 7850 cards though, but that’s about to change with today’s launch of the GTX 660.

The GTX 660 is the latest in the Kepler family, designed to target the mid-range of the gaming GPU market, and while it shares a similar lineage as the 660 Ti, this new card is a bit handcuffed in performance by comparison, with lower specs but also a lower price tag as well. With cards running in the $230-$240 price range for the most part, this is cheaper than AMD’s 7870, so it will be interesting to see how the competitors stack up.

One of the cards we’re looking at today is the Gigabyte GTX 660 Windforce, a mid-range gaming card that sports the cooler of the same name. We’ve seen this cooler on other cards models, most recently on the GTX 660 Ti by Gigabyte, and we came away suitably impressed at the low temperatures and noise levels.