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During our testing, we accidentally left ray tracing on in Metro Exodus, and even the menu was nigh-unusable. Get 1.4X power efficiency over previous generation for a faster, cooler, and quieter gaming experience. Nvidia’s Turing roll-out continues with the arrival of its first sub-£300/$300 graphics card – the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. And yes, that’s GTX rather than RTX with Team Green opting to remove hardware-accelerated ray tracing and machine learning features from its cheaper range of GPUs. It is still Turing, however, using the same revised shader modules offering enhanced performance and increased power efficiency.
Until then, however, the value proposition offered by the RX 590 is almost too good to pass up. In terms of raw speed, the GTX 1660 is a really tough act to beat at this price, and definitely the card you should buy instead of the 6GB GTX 1060 if you’re after 60fps on High-Ultra settings at 1080p and Medium-High at 1440p. Still, regardless of how small the performance boost actually is in practice, the fact remains that, at 1080p, the GTX 1660 is still the faster card overall. I’d be tempted to err on the side of the GTX 1060 if the GTX 1660 was more expensive, but when both cards cost the same amount of money, it just doesn’t make any sense to opt for the 6GB GTX 1060 any more. Now, in case you’re looking at the GTX 1660’s name and thinking, ‘Hold on a sec, what the heck is that all about? ‘, here’s a brief reminder about what Nvidia’s new GTX 16-series actually is and how it differs to their RTX 20-series.
Our videos are multi-gigabyte files and we’ve chosen a high quality provider to ensure fast downloads. However, that bandwidth isn’t free and so we charge a small monthly subscription fee of $5. We think it’s a small price to pay for unlimited access to top-tier quality encodes of our content. However, as you’ll see from the benchmarks, the performance uplift offered by Nvidia’s new card is substantial.
By delivering performance more in line with GTX 1070, it does deliver value and isn’t a million miles away from the throughput delivered by a stock RX Vega 56. The gtx 1090 is also a very modest upgrade over the Pascal-flavored GTX 1660. Nobody in their right mind would upgrade one generation x60 card to the next, but if you’ve got a GTX 960 or older and are on a budget, the GTX 1660 will be a good upgrade if you’re still at 1080p and limited to around $220 or so. As far as the board itself goes, it’s eight inches long so it’ll fit in most cases quite easily. It features a metal backplate as part of its TUF design, and has a two-fan cooling apparatus. Asus recommends a 450w PSU for it, and its output options include HDMI, DisplayPort, and DVI.
Based on the specifications alone we can surmise that the most powerful of the three cards is the RTX 2060, followed by the GTX 1660 Ti, then GTX 1660 Super, with the GTX 1660 trailing in the rear. While clock speeds are relatively comparable across all four cards (and actually a little higher on the lower-end cards), the drop in CUDA cores from the RTX 2060 to the 1660 Ti is the main differentiating factor in performance. While the 1660 does take a step down in CUDA cores too, its use of GDDR5 memory leads to a 33 percent reduction in memory bandwidth. What we have in the GTX 1660 is a very welcome, if somewhat predictable graphics card which slots in almost perfectly in amongst other mid-range cards out there.
The hub on the fans are slightly smaller than usual, which allows the fan blades to be a bit longer. And there is a ring that runs around the blades to add some rigidity and reportedly increase downward air pressure. Both 1660-model cards are targeted at delivering decent 1080p gaming performance.
MSI applies their latest iteration of the TWIN FROZR 7 cooler for the GeForce gtx 1090 which makes use of two 9 cm TORX 3.0 fans which combine the advantages of both traditional and dispersion fan blades to generate huge amounts of airflow. The new trims on the traditional fan blades create concentrated airflow for higher air pressure while also reducing noise. The Gaming X edition has been designed with budget in mind and is merely a few tenners more expensive over reference. It’s an attractive product with good cooling and acoustic performance.
For budget and midrange graphics cards, the test system is perhaps overkill, but this allows all the graphics cards to reach their full performance potential. For video outputs, Zotac provides one HDMI 2.0b port along with three DisplayPort 1.4 ports, and it can run gtx 1080 8gb all four outputs simultaneously. If you have an older monitor that requires a DVI-D connection, you’ll have to bring your own adapter to the party. There are no RGB LEDs, or any lights for that matter, no dual VBIOS chips, or really any other higher end features.