MSI’s GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X graphics card is one of their top end models from the
new 1660 Ti lineup, so let’s take a look and see just how well it performs. To do this
I’ll be testing gaming at 1080p, 1440p and 4K, as well as overclocking, cooling, power
draw and noise levels to help you decide if it’s worth buying.
Let’s start by taking a look at the card. Like other recent MSI cards it’s got a dark
grey and black theme, nice neutral colours and should blend in well with most builds.
There are two fans on the front, a metal backplate with a nice brushed finish and MSI logo on
the back, and a single 8 pin power connector on the top.
There’s RGB lighting on the top and bottom of the card, and this can be controlled using
MSI’s light sync software to change the effects or match it with the rest of your
system.
For the I/O we’ve got three DisplayPort 1.4 outputs and single HDMI 2.0b port.
The card is on the smaller side compared to others I’ve covered recently, just under
25cm in length, 13cm tall and 4.6cm wide, making it a two slot card weighing in at 869g
or 1.9 pounds.
The 1660 Ti is Nvidia’s first graphics card with their new Turing architecture to not
feature RTX, as a result it’s both cheaper and branded as a GTX card. This also means
we’ve still got the benefits of GDDR6 memory, of which there’s 6GB, and here are the rest
of the specs for that matter while we’re at it. It’s worth noting that this gaming
x card has a nice overclock on it out of the box, with a 105MHz higher boost clock compared
to reference specs, so we’re expecting it to perform a little better than many other
1660 Ti cards at stock.
The system that I’m testing with has an Intel i7-8700K CPU overclocked to 5.0GHz in
an MSI Z390 Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard, along with 16GB of T-Force Night Hawk CL16
memory running at DDR4-3200 in dual channel. Check the links in the description for details
on all of the components as well as for up to date pricing.
Let’s start out with Apex Legends, I’ve tested this one using maximum settings and
it was easily playable with both 1080p and 1440p resolutions. I could kind of get by
with 4K but I wouldn’t recommend it with this card, although lower settings would go
a bit better.
Battlefield 5 was tested in campaign mode, and again it was running perfectly fine at
1080p, and still great at 1440p with high settings able to average above 60 FPS. Again
4K wasn’t a good experience here with high settings, only just sitting on 30 FPS, not
good for a first person shooter game.
Metro Exodus was tested with the built in benchmark, which has been shown to perform
below actual game play, so this is more of a synthetic test. I chose to test this way
for when I do future comparisons I can more easily compare results between different graphics,
plus you can do the same test and compare.
Far Cry New Dawn was tested with the built in benchmark, and we’re starting to see
a similar trend, where this test was able to get decent frame rates at 1080p and 1440p
resolutions even with high settings, but then fairly weak performance at 4K.
Far Cry 5 was also tested with the built in benchmark, and this game gets higher FPS than
the newer Far Cry New Dawn just covered, although despite the small increase in this game still
not great at 4K in this test with high settings.
Overwatch was tested in the practice range so I can consistently reproduce the test run.
Even at ultra settings with 4K the game was easily playable, with 1% lows still above
60 FPS, not surprising as it’s a well optimized game, then of course much better with lower
resolutions.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was tested with the built in benchmark with high settings
used once again. 60 FPS averages in this test were almost possible with 1440p, and then
higher at 1080p, so both should play fairly well. 4K even wasn’t too bad, as this game
doesn’t need a super high frame rate to play.
Fortnite was tested with the replay feature, so the exact same test was done at each resolution
with high settings in use. 4K wasn’t too great here, but it was playable with lower
settings, otherwise 1440p and 1080p ran perfectly fine here.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested using the built in benchmark, and this test is another
example of one that was able to sit at 60 FPS with 1440p high settings with fairly low
results comparatively at 4k.
Watch Dogs 2 was tested with high settings, and this is another game that plays alright
with lower frame rates, so the solid 30 FPS I was getting at 4K was playable, with 1440p
once more giving us that golden 60 FPS even in this resource intensive game, granted this
is also a CPU heavy game and we do have an overclocked 8700K.
Ghost Recon is another resource intensive game which was tested with the built in benchmark
at high settings, and you’re probably getting tired of hearing me say this, but above 60
FPS averages were possible at 1440p with higher at 1080p, while 4K wasn’t good here.
CS:GO was tested using the Ulletical FPS benchmark, and as a well optimized game that runs on
basically anything I was seeing high frame rates even at 4K, definitely playable, however
we can see the 1% lows tank in this test, indicating the lower resolutions should provide
a more consistent experience.
Rainbow Six Siege was tested with the built in benchmark, and this is another game that’s
optimized pretty well, with 80 FPS possible even at high settings at 4K, with well over
100 FPS possible with lower resolutions.
The Witcher 3 was tested with hairworks disabled, and I didn’t find it too bad at 4K, the
1% low wasn’t too low showing that there weren’t too many dips to performance, however
it was noticeably better at 1440p or below.
PUBG was tested using the replay feature with the same replay file between resolutions.
At high settings with 4K it was a bit choppy and the average FPS is too low for a first
person shooter anyway, but definitely going alright at 1440p and below.
Shadow of War was tested using the built in benchmark and continues the trend of 60 FPS
averages possible at 1440p with high settings in use, not so great at 4K, and then around
100 FPS at 1080p.
As we’ve seen we’re able to get some pretty good performance in the games tested, 1080p
runs with great frame rates even with high settings, while 1440p is even playable in
these titles with around 60 FPS averages or above. Some games were sort of playable at
4K, but this is definitely not a 4K card, at least not with half decent settings, I’d
advise looking at something with more power for 4K gaming, personally I’d be after GTX
1080 Ti or RTX 2080 levels of performance for that.
For overclocking I’ve retested with Far Cry 5 at high settings. I was able to overclock
the GPU core by 130MHz and boosted the memory clock speed by 1000MHz using MSI Afterburner.
At 1080p there was a 3.3% improvement to average FPS, a 5.6% improvement at 1440p, and then
a 6.5% improvement at 4K, as the graphics become less constrained by the CPU at higher
resolutions. This isn’t too bad, considering the card already has a pretty good factory
overclock out of the box.
So we’re seeing some decent performance, but what are the thermals like? These are
the temperatures I measured with the Heaven benchmark in an ambient room temperature of
26 degrees Celsius, on the warmer side as we’ve only just finished summer here in
Australia. Despite this the temperatures were still looking pretty good, a little warm at
idle but it’s fair given the fans don’t spin at all until around 60 degrees Celsius.
By manually maxing out the fan speed with MSI Afterburner it was possible to reduce
the temperatures by 10 degrees Celsius, and my manual overclocks only raised GPU core
temperature by 1 degree.
Just for fun I’ve used my thermal camera so you can see how the backplate looks with
the stress tests running. It was definitely warm to the touch, but nowhere near as hot
as some of the other higher end cards I’ve tested that need oven mitts.
I’ve got the average and peak clock speeds while running the Heaven benchmark for an
extended period, and with the 130MHz overclock applied with MSI Afterburner we're getting
a nice little boost. We can also see that by maxing out the fans we're able to boost
performance just a tiny bit, as GPU boost prefers cooler temperatures.
These are the average and peak fan speeds measured under the same tests as the temperatures
and clock speeds just shown. At idle they don't spin at all so it was silent, and then
they only rise a small amount with the overclock applied, I couldn't really tell the difference
sitting next to it. By maxing out the fan speed it does get noticeably louder, but I
don’t think it was that loud, considering I did this test with the side panel of my
case off. Here’s how these tests sounded so you can get an idea for yourself.
As I’ve got 7 other fans in the case this isn’t the best test, however you can use
the idle test as a baseline with just the case fans going and then compare the rest
against that.
I’ll also note that while testing I was not able to hear any coil whine with my unit.
Here’s what total system power draw from the wall looked like in the same Heaven benchmark,
so once manually overclocked there’s just a 10 watt power increase.
For up to date pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over
time. At the time of recording, in the US the MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X is going
for around $309 USD, or around $509 AUD here in Australia.
As for whether or not it’s worth it, I think I’ll leave that for the comparison videos
I’ll be doing between this, the 1060, 1070 and 2060 graphics, as I’ll have a better
idea of how it stacks up once I start comparing, so get subscribed for those.
There are of course cheaper 1660 Ti options available, MSI’s Gaming X appears to be
their top of the line option for 1660 Ti at the moment, so you can save money and get
a lower clocked out of the box card. Sure it will perform a few FPS slower, but there’s
a very good chance you can make up for that with some manual overclocking in most cases
anyway, however what you’re usually paying for is the better cooling, extra metal costs
more. I bought this one with my own money to have it available for future testing. Here
in Australia on launch it was actually priced the same as many other models that were clocked
lower with worse cooling, I’m not really sure why, but for me it made sense to get
this model.
So what did you guys think of MSI’s GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X graphics card? As we’ve
seen it’s easily capable of 1080p gaming and even 1440p with higher settings, let me
know your thoughts down in the comments, and get subscribed for upcoming comparisons between
the 1660 Ti and other graphics cards.