Even at 20 inch and 1080 p and heck even 900p ( 1600x900 ) the 7850 wont give the best performance out there . Whenever you see those reviews check out for the Anti Aliasing settings , XXAA ( XX= MS , FX , etc ) . This things are there for a reason , they do matter ! . Specially people say FXAA is better . In the future more and more technologies will come out.
The cheaper 660ti cards are reference cards , not worth it specially in case of 660ti .
Harry, I bought an AMD HD5770 card back in the day (January 24[SUP]th[/SUP] 2010) and paired it with a 20" monitor, it has performed commendably till date in all the games I have thrown at it. Exceptions exist --
METRO 2033, The Witcher 2, Crysis: Warhead but on the whole it has never let me down.
I could have bought an AMD HD5850 but thanks to an overbearing '
guilt trip' hanging on me I decided the HD5770 should do. I think spending power varies from person to person and ~35 -->40fps on Crysis Enhanced Edition is more than sufficient; unless you are a complete graphics junkie who wants everything maxed out, in that case I am very sorry you should probably aim for a HD7970
CrossFire / GTX680
SLi setup and nothing below as anything below will be a compromise on the quality.
Also there is nothing known as a GTX660Ti '
reference edition'; every card is unique, nVidia has no reference PCB / cooler design for these. The release on August 16[SUP]th[/SUP] was a virtual launch there was no card from nVidia themselves all cards were from 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] companies like
eVGA,
ZOTAC!, ASUS and
MSi.
GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review: Nvidia's Trickle-Down Keplernomics : The Kepler Trickle-Down Continues /
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti review roundup: impressive performance for around $300 -- Engadget /
Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti 2GB Review | bit-tech.net /
AnandTech - The GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review, Feat. EVGA, Zotac, and Gigabyte /
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti Video Card Review w/ ASUS, EVGA & MSI - The GeForce GTX 660 Ti - Legit Reviews
Every review is a roundup not focused on a single card. Apart from the Tom's Hardware review which is based on a
MSi, a company which is not a exclusive board partner for nVidia.
This launch will be what NVIDIA calls a “virtual†launch, which is to say that there aren’t any reference cards being shipped to partners to sell or to press to sample. Instead all of NVIDIA’s partners will be launching with semi-custom and fully-custom cards right away. This means we’re going to see a wide variety of cards right off the bat, however it also means that there will be less consistency between partners since no two cards are going to be quite alike.
For a 20" monitor for comfortable performance of games in the coming two years the HD7850 2GB
OR GTX660Ti are more than capable, HD7870 2GB if you want to over-clock and unleash the power later on but anything over these cards is just pure bunkum, you might as well spend on an SSD to enjoy speeding up of load-times and boot ups.