Nvidia Geforce Gtx 1660 Arrives To Fill An Entry Gaming Desktop Slot
That means reference versions might be a fair bit slower, and there is the chance that the $219 (£199) launch price of this OC card might not stick around long after release day sales have passed. That won’t make a massive difference in terms of overall gtx 1090 gaming performance, but does change the total bill of materials for the new card. GDDR6 may not necessarily be in the HBM2 realms of super-expensive memory tech, but switching to GDDR5 will likely represent a pretty significant cash saving.
In order to show you what 4K gaming actually looks like we needed to build our own platform to supply high quality 4K video for offline viewing. But with pricing at a ‘tweener’ position, we’ll be concentrating our benchmarks on both the existing ‘go to’ cards for 1080p gaming, and the more premium end occupied by Vega 56, RTX 2060 and the outgoing GTX 1070. In terms of inputs and outputs, power is supplied via an eight-pin PCIe Express socket, while HDMI 2.0, dual-link DVI and DisplayPort deliver support for pretty much every kind of monitor out there. The USB-C VirtualLink socket from the upper range Turing cards is absent, but I’d venture to suggest that it won’t be missed at this price-point – even though the GTX 1660 Ti very comfortably exceeds the base spec for VR support. The RX 590, however, does come with three free games as part of AMD’s ongoing free games bundle , which arguably makes it better value overall.
Based on the specifications alone we can surmise that the most powerful of the three cards is the RTX 2060, followed by the gigabyte gtx 1060 3gb 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.
It also has a 6GB VRAM buffer, but it’s here where the changes have been made. Nvidia has upgraded the 8 Gb/s GDDR5 memory of the standard 1660 to 14 Gb/s GDDR6 memory and this sees a massive 75% increase in memory bandwidth. In fact, this provides the 1660 Super with even more memory bandwidth than the Ti model. Gigabyte’s Windforce 3X cooler gtx 1090 features three 80mm fans, with ribbed fan blades to add rigidity and reduce noise. And those fans spin in alternate directions to minimize turbulence and maximize air-flow through the heatsink’s fins. The overall design is only 2-slots wide, which is nice to see in era where more and more cards essentially require 3 slots locations.
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.
Ultimately the GTX 1660 is exactly what it needs to be – much quicker than the GTX GB, a match for the RX 590 and a huge step up from the GTX GB, which unless you’re picking it up for less than $160/£150, really isn’t worth it now. There is also the issue that pricing for all versions of the GTX 1060 is obviously lower than at launch now and I’ve added some of the cheaper examples to the above table. The GTX GB can be had for just $184/£164 and the 6GB card for $209/£190, the latter being practically the same as the GTX 1660. Board partners will undoubtedly target a range of frequencies to differentiate their cards. However, the official base clock rate is 1,530 MHz with a GPU Boost specification of 1,785 MHz.