Sym, Ante, Storm, I need advice

Since you guys are the PC experts, I need a bit of advice.

My 660ti just arrived, is there anything I should know or do prior to adding it to my PC and starting her up?

Have you ever installed a GPU before?

Its really really easy

There is not much to it

- Turn off PC

-Install GPU

-Turn on PC

-Update drivers if needed

-Profit

Tip- there should only be two cables to hook up, make sure the GPU is stable and locked in

Edit- Have fun. Getting a new card is always an awesome feeling.

for extra safety switch off your power supply and wait ~5 seconds before touching anything inside your case.

I've installed smaller GPUs before, but this thing is massive!! I'll putup a picture later for comparison.

Ante, I did the electrical safety part, but I have no idea if I'm grounded or not. I haven't touched anything other than the outer case of the GPU, not my processor or mobo, and I have been frequently grabbing hold of metal objects (get rid of static electricity, I hope that works). Is there any precaution I should take at this point? Right now all I'm doing is connecting the additional power adaptors. And this just occured to me, how do I know if my Power Supply will be able to handle this card? It's just a stock PSU that came with the case, is there a risk that it'll die out on me? And how can I prevent bad shit from happening?

Ok, my ps has a bunch of numbers under the MAX category, but I think it'll work. It's recommended that the PSU be 450W+ and I think my PSU can handle that.

yes grabbing hold of the metal on your case will ground you


if the PSU isn't powerful enough your PC will likely just shut off when the GPU gets stressed out

How many watts is your psu

Frostbyrn wrote:You left Tom off the list

Indeed

I did. My mistake, sorry Tom.

Ok, I looked it up, my PSU is 600 watts, which should be powerful enough to handle it.

And ok, I was grounded then.

Now all I have to do is connect the extra power cables and I'm good.

Yea 600 watts is enough

Ok, then I have one last question, and pardon me if this is blindingly stupid.

The 660ti requires 2 additional 6-pin PCI-e power adapters. I have one six-pin adapter free from the PSU, but for the second one I need to use on of the included peripheral power-6pin PCI-e adapter cables. It's got the 6-pin plug for the GPU, and then 2 4-pin peripheral power connectors. Now my question, do I have to plug each of those into a different peripheral port plug on a different cable, or can I use 2 plugs on the same cable?

Pariah wrote:Ok, then I have one last question, and pardon me if this is blindingly stupid.

The 660ti requires 2 additional 6-pin PCI-e power adapters. I have one six-pin adapter free from the PSU, but for the second one I need to use on of the included peripheral power-6pin PCI-e adapter cables. It's got the 6-pin plug for the GPU, and then 2 4-pin peripheral power connectors. Now my question, do I have to plug each of those into a different peripheral port plug on a different cable, or can I use 2 plugs on the same cable?

The cable should have a split allowing each 4-pin connector to have its own port. Does it look like this?

I can't see the picture since I'm on my phone ATM, but it was a 6-pin pci-e to 2x molex. I was confused as to whether I could put the molexes on the same line to the psu, in the end I just put the on two different ones.

on my modular PSU even I would have to put in two different cables to power it,so I think you did it right man lol

I had room for everything except I had to put my main front fan on molex power,although I don't think that's too bad,it seems nice for it to always be putting cool air into the case.The others are all mobo powered though.

How do you like your card?

JR- did you get your yet?

Sym, I haven't put it through any truly intensive testing, but initial impressions are that it is a beast and a half. For comparison, my 9800 couldn't touch Deus Ex Human Revolution on it's lowest settings. This thing chewed up the Highest settings, spit them out and proceeded to destroy everything I put it up against. It's beautiful. Now I need to figure out how to test it's limits.

Heaven benchmark is always a good benchmark tool, as its free and it pushes your card pretty hard. It also gives a score to compare tour current hardware with some known scores (ie some of SeC PC users have had their machines tested so we have some base scores).

Another good one is 3DMark, but this one is partially free, as more advanced testings are locked away in paid content. Of course, you can get a pirated version, but I never do recommend that...

Benchmarking can be useful, since it will let you know if something is not functioning up to par and you will have something to work off of when you are trying to further optimize your system.