NVIDIA has officially launched the GTX 1660 today, it’s latest non-RTX graphics card after the GTX 1660 Ti aimed for 1080p gaming. As there are no Founders Edition as well for this release, you can only get the GTX 1660 from the rest of NVIDIA’s board partners starting from tomorrow at a price of $219.
We have our thanks to Gigabyte as usual for sending over their GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming OC 6G for making this review possible. Without any further ado, let’s proceed with the test and see what kind of performance can we expect from the GTX 1660 – Will it perform similar to a GTX 1060 or better?
Specifications
GTX 1660 | GTX 1660 Ti | |
Graphics Processing Cluster | 3 | 3 |
Texture Processing Clusters | 11 | 12 |
Streaming Multiprocessors | 22 | 24 |
CUDA Cores (single precision) | 1408 | 1536 |
Tensor Cores | N/A | N/A |
RT Cores | N/A | N/A |
Texture Units | 88 | 96 |
ROP Units | 48 | 48 |
Base Clock | 1530MHz | 1500MHz |
Boost Clock | 1785MHz | 1770MHz |
Memory Clock | 8000MHz | 12000MHz |
Memory Data Rate | 8Gbps | 12Gbps |
L2 Cache Size | 1536K | 1536K |
Total Video Memory | 6144MB GDDR5 | 6144MB GDDR6 |
Memory Interface | 192-bit | 192-bit |
Total Memory Bandwidth | 192.1GB/s | 288.1GB/s |
Texture Rate (Bilinear) | 157.1 GigaTexels/second | 169.9 GigaTexels/second |
Fabrication Process | 12nm FFN | 12nm FFN |
Transistor Count | 6.6 Billion | 6.6 Billion |
Power Connectors | One 8-pin | One 8-pin |
Recommended Power Supply | 400 Watts | 400 Watts |
Thermal Design Power (TDP) | 120 Watts | 120 Watts |
Thermal Threshold | 95°C | 95°C |
Unboxing
Packaging wise, Gigabyte pretty much already standardized the design that separates its generic Gigabyte brand from its AORUS brand. The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming OC 6G looks almost the same as the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming OC 6G, except for the Ti moniker. Similar to its GTX 1660 Ti counterpart, you’ll find the ‘Turing Shaders’ as one of the highlighted features at the front of the box instead of ‘Ray Tracing’.
At the back of the box, you’ll find more of the highlighted features such as the Windforce cooling fan design, 3 heatpipes that comes in direct contact with the GPU die, RGB Fusion 2.0 lighting and the full cover backplate design for the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming OC 6G.
Content wise, you’ll find a CD for the drivers and utilities, a quick start guide and the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming OC 6G.
The GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming OC 6G
Design wise, Gigabyte equipped its GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming OC 6G with the same triple fan cooler as the one on the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming OC 6G. The dimension is exactly the same, which is at 280 x 116 x 40mm and uses 2-slot in total. It’s slightly longer than the GTX 10 series Founders Edition card, but it will still fit in ITX chassis like the SilverStone Raven RVZ02 – good for building a slim powerhouse sleeper PC.
Here you can see the middle fan that spins in an alternate direction which according to Gigabyte, are able to provide better airflow to further improve the cooling performance compared to most traditional design that has all cooling fan spinning in the same direction.
The RGB elements on this card is very minimal, which makes it suitable for those who doesn’t really like too much RGB lighting in their system. While the RGB lighting on this card is very limited, you can still customize and control the lighting on the Gigabyte logo using Gigabyte’s RGB Fusion 2.0 software.
Just like the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming OC 6G, you will need a 400W power supply that has at least one 8-pin PCIe power connector.
As for the back plate, it’s not actually made of metal but it has a rather interesting design that goes along with the cooler to form a full coverage design.
The output options on this card is exactly the same as the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming OC 6G, which consists of 3 x DisplayPort and 1 x HDMI port.
Test System Setup
For our games benchmark test, we’ve selected a number of AAA titles to run at its highest possible settings using the following setup under ambient temperature of 31°C:
CPU | Intel Core i7 8700K @5GHz |
Motherboard | ASUS ROG Maximus X Apex |
Memory | G.Skill TridentZ RGB 16GB @3200MHz |
Graphics Card | Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming OC 6G |
Power Supply | Enermax MaxTytan 1250W |
Primary Storage | ADATA SU800 256GB |
Secondary Storage | WD Black 6TB |
CPU Cooler | Raijintek Orcus 240 |
Chassis | Cooler Master Test Bench V1 |
Operating System | Windows 10 64bit |
The test is done separately for games that support both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 at the resolution of 1920×1080, 2560×1440 and 3840×2160. Just like the GTX 1660 Ti, DLSS feature will not be available for the GTX 1660 as it lacks of Tensor cores which can be found on the RTX cards.
On our 1080p benchmark, you can immediately tell that the GTX 1660 Ti is more superior than both the GTX 1660 and GTX 1060. The GTX 1060 does perform pretty closely to the GTX 1660 on quite a number of games in the list, but when it comes to newer games like Battlefield V, Far Cry 5 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the GTX 1660 can handle it better than the GTX 1060.
The performance gap between the GTX 1060 and GTX 1660 gets wider as we scale up the resolution to 1440p. The GTX 1060 starts to struggle on pretty much all of the titles in the list, which is barely playable – except for APEX Legends. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is totally unplayable on the highest settings due to unbearable stutters throughout the game.
Going on 4K resolution is definitely pushing the limit as majority of the titles are considered unplayable on the highest settings. Though, this doesn’t means that you can’t game on 4K using either the GTX 1060, GTX 1660 or GTX 1660 Ti. Lowering the settings to medium or lower will make the games more playable, but that will defeat the purpose of playing games on 4K resolution.
Temperature
While running under default settings, the GPU temperature hovers around 40°C on idle and peaked at 64°C most of the time during our games benchmark. Since the cooler is the same as the one on the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming OC 6G, you can adjust the fan speed to 60% manually better cooling performance without sacrificing too much on the acoustic performance.
Final Thoughts
Based on the benchmark results alone we can alreay see that the GTX 1660 is than the GTX 1060 in terms of performance. Although you can definitely make the GTX 1060 perform better in some of the games by increasing the clock speed, the GTX 1660 still have the upper hand in terms of features which is only available on the Turing architecture GPU.
Content and Motion Adaptive Shading, Variable Rate Shading are some of the features available to the Turing architecture but we have yet to see any other titles that actually utilizes this in their games except for Wolfenstein II. Though, after seeing NVIDIA’s feat on the DLSS update for Metro Exodus, we’d say that the current GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti much more of a future proof choice that is ready for existing and upcoming game titles that offers this features.
The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming OC 6G is priced at RM1199, which we find it pretty reasonable for the features and performance it can deliver. If RTX isn’t really your thing but you’re still looking forward the rest of the upcoming / unannounced game titles that utilizes the advanced shading features that is available to the Turing architecture, the GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660 might be a choice for you want to consider for.
Pros
- Performs better than a GTX 1060
- Good performance on 1080p and reasonable performance on 1440p
- Good cooling performance
- Reasonable price
- Support Variable Rate Shading and other shading features for Turing GPU
Cons
- Not using GDDR6 memory like the GTX 1660 Ti
- Doesn’t support NVLink / SLI
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