If you can spend about 300 euros on a video card, then you haven't seen a new alternative from AMD or Nvidia for about 2.5 years. However, 2019 promises improvement from both giants and it is Nvidia that takes the first step with their new GeForce GTX 1660 Ti.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
Price From € 279,-Clock speed gpu 1500MHz (1770MHz boost)
Memory 6GB gddr6
Connections DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI-DL
Recommended nutrition 450 watts
Website www.nvidia.com
9 Score 90
- Pros
- Big step faster than its predecessor
- Very good 1080p performance
- G-Sync and FreeSync
- Extremely economical
- Negatives
- No Ray tracing and DLSS
- Vega 56 achieves higher FPS
We have to think about the name, because GTX 1660 Ti? Where video card naming is normally reasonable to follow, this name for gamers, especially casual gamers, will not immediately paint a picture of what you can expect. The price does, however, because with approximately 280 euros as an introductory price for an entry-level GeForce GTX 1660 Ti to approximately 340 for the most luxurious variant, it becomes clear that this is the successor to the popular GTX 1060 6G. Nvidia does not make its own Founders Edition for the RTX 1660 TI, the well-known graphic card manufacturers immediately market all kinds of their own variants with their own cooling solutions.
New, not new?
The GTX 1660 Ti uses Nvidia's new Turing architecture, the same architecture found in the more expensive GeForce RTX cards. This makes it more efficient than its predecessor and we see familiar steps forward from generation to generation. What is missing, however, are the RT and Tensor cores from the RTX series. As a result, the GTX 1660 Ti misses Nvidia's two main showpieces of recent months: Ray Tracing and DLSS. Affordable Ray Tracing therefore seems a few years away.
Score where it counts
In the majority of games we see an increase of approximately 30 percent in frames per second compared to its predecessor the GTX 1060. In the latest games that are specifically optimized for this new architecture, we see that gap rise considerably to 50 percent and sometimes even higher: those are significant steps. Practically every game plays at 1080p resolution on very high settings with high frame rates (60-120+), and we see enough headroom to also play next year's games comfortably on high settings and at over 60 FPS.
With the GTX 1660 Ti, the entire 10-series can retire. AMD's Radeon Vega 56 does compete because it is slightly faster for the same price, but AMD's much higher energy consumption simply makes the GTX 1660 Ti cheaper in the long run. Do you have a compact system, one that doesn't cool very well, or an OEM (HP, Dell, etc.) system with a moderate power supply? Then you also want the more economical Nvidia card, because even a 300 Watt power supply turned out to be sufficient for our Core i9-9900K GTX 1660 Ti test bench.
Conclusion
It may not really cut the competition, but Nvidia's latest GTX offers exactly the performance that gamers want with a 1080p display, at a price just sharp enough to pass the competition and make it the 1080p video card of this year. time to be promoted.
