- So, NVIDIA have released a GTX model called the 1660 Ti,
and it's not featuring any ray tracing or tensor cores.
And so, with that, it does have a cut-down die size
of 293 millimeters squared,
which is a big drop from the RTX 2060s.
And this card is on 12 nanometer as well,
just like the RTX variants.
So it does have those Turing cores on board,
which does have better IPC than the previous
GTX 10-series cards.
So, today we've got six graphics cards in this equation,
four which I've sort of pointed out and singled out here
because we only talk about them in the conclusion.
And I know you guys came here,
you clicked on here for the benchmarks and the real scoop.
I know you guys came here for that real scoop,
not a little scoop.
If you've got a tub of ice cream and you got the spoon out,
and you scoop in and you get a little bit out.
You're like, nah, eat that quickly,
you go in for a real scoop.
That's what you're gonna to get at Tech YES City here today,
gonna get that real scoop, so let's roll the intro
and roll those benchmarks for you guys.
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So there's the gaming benchmarks done with the GTX 1660 Ti.
And I gotta admit, it does sound a little bit weird
saying that naming scheme, especially coming from
the 10 series and then going down from the RTX 2000 series.
But regardless, let's go through these gaming benchmarks
a little bit more here with Resident Evil 2 up first,
the RTX 2060 taking the win,
the GTX 1070 still performing very strong in this benchmark
and the 1660 Ti really just beating
the Vega 56 when it's overclocked.
Now, I will point out that the Vega 56
I have is a reference model.
The GTX 1070 I have here is the Gaming-X version,
so it is overclocked out of the factory quite aggressively.
So the numbers you do see here today with the 1070
will be slightly in favor of it,
but it's because these things are just
literally readily available,
and we'll talk about that in the conclusion.
But next up we've got Apex Legends,
and this was a multiplayer benchmark.
I decided not to test the single player,
because it gets a lot higher FPS
than you can in the multiplayer benchmarks,
and there's just so much going on in multiplayer.
Even though there's a lot of variance,
I did get the inkling here
that AMD cards did perform very well,
at least with the particular settings that I was using.
The 1660 Ti did fall a little bit behind in this benchmark,
I guess since it's just a newly-released graphics card
coupled with a newly-release title,
needs some more driver optimizations.
But going over Far Cry 5, the overclocked 1660 Ti
did clip out the GTX 1070 here.
And of course, the RTX 2060 coming out on top.
And the Vega 56 doing okay in this benchmark as well.
Then, Metro Exodus pretty much lined up
with all the cards as they fitted in their order
in the graphs that I've made here.
So it was a decent performance from the 1660 Ti
and also the RTX 2060s, but the Vega 56
and 1070 still did very well.
But moving over to Shadows of the Tomb Raider,
this is when the 1660 Ti did pull ahead
of the 1070 when it was overclocked,
the RTX 2060 coming out ahead.
I guess those new optimizations
with Turing cores and the newest engines
are taking advantage of what it has to offer.
Moving on to Tom Clancy's The Division,
this really does favor the RTX cards heavily,
beating out the 1070 by quite a bit,
and our Vega 56 sort of coming out
in between the 1070 and also the RTX 2060.
But the 1660 Ti did very well here,
especially when it was overclocked.
Though this is the most impressive thing
of this card right here, I'm gonna pull it up for you guys,
and that is the power-consumption figures.
When I saw the power meter, my jaw dropped,
I didn't know what was going on.
This was very low power consumption for what it was doing.
It was basically performing a lot better than a 1060,
yet it was using roughly the same power.
So it was very impressive in terms of its efficiency.
Though one thing in particular to this GALAX card,
it did have a power limit of a 100%.
And so, I did manage to get the overclock stable
to plus 155 megahertz on the core,
which allowed it to go over two gigahertz.
And then out of the box, it got around 1,840 megahertz.
And on top of that, the memory did go
all the way up plus a thousand on the slider,
so it was basically able to get
RTX 2000 series GDDR6 memory speeds,
as it comes out of the box
with 6,000 megahertz set on the GDDR6.
So overclocking is definitely
worth your while on this graphics card.
In terms of the 100% power limit,
I did ask NVIDIA if this was a limit imposed
on these 1660 Ti graphics cards.
They said, not in this case,
they haven't imposed any limits like that.
It's probably just a bug in afterburner.
And actually using GALAX's own software, it was a bit off.
So I'd like to see the software get an update.
Because I believe you'll get even higher overclocks
out of this thing once that power limit's able
to go up to around 20% for example.
And speaking of this card in particular,
it has a DVI port at the back, HDMI 2.0 out,
and also a DisplayPort 1.4.
But the temperatures, noise and also fan speeds
were very impressive with this card in particular.
Auto speeds, even when it was overclocked, 17%.
And at these levels it was so whisper quiet
that this 31-dB reading is actually inaccurate,
because the fan speeds on the CPU cooler
in the background were overpowering it.
So basically, it's whisper quiet at auto fan speeds.
60% will keep the card under 50 degrees
and still keep the noise very low.
So it's a recommended sweet spot on this graphics card.
And then going up to 80% and also a 100%,
you see the temperatures drop down very low,
going under 45 degrees.
But the noise does get pretty high, especially at a 100%.
So absolutely amazing cooler implementation here from GALAX.
It does weigh in at about 605 grams,
also measures 22 and a half centimeters long,
but doesn't feature a backplate.
But I'm sure that's not really gonna be a problem
for people who wanna get into the mid-range gaming segment.
Especially since the card does weigh 600 grams,
it's not really gonna suffer from GPU sag either.
But anyway guys, let's put these cards
out here at the front.
Because this card here at $279
does now pretty much blow this card away, the RX 590,
he's just gonna fall down here.
Because he doesn't really have much going for him
in terms of value anymore.
Because the efficiency's better, the performance is better
and NVIDIA have also updated their drivers now
to support adaptive sync on FreeSync monitors.
And on top of that, you do get the same NV Encoder
improvements as the RTX 2000 series over the 1000 series,
which is really good if you're a streamer on a budget
and you don't have a good front end
in terms of your motherboard, CPU,
or you don't have a second rig,
then utilizing the onboard encoder with the GTX 1660 Ti
is going to be a great option in terms of efficiency.
So it's kind of hard to recommend an RX 590 at the moment.
But here we've got the RTX 2060, and that's only $70 more.
But it does perform in a higher league than the GTX 1660 Ti.
But it does so whilst using about 50 watts more power.
And also, you do get a backplate
if that's a big deal breaker for you.
And you do get DLSS and ray tracing support
on this graphics card. But I will say, as it stands,
the ray tracing and DLSS support is messy at the moment.
And so, the 1660 Ti, in terms of
raw performance for the dollar, is decent.
It's not impressive, it's not the worst.
But it's biggest feature is its efficiency.
And so, when you're building a new pc,
you don't have to go out and get an expensive case
with super high airflow,
you don't have to go out and get an expensive power supply.
Because this thing will give you great performance
for the power it's using.
I guess that's the biggest benefit
of this graphics card here today.
But now you may be wondering what NVIDIA have done
going from RTX to GTX here on these two graphics cards.
And it's basically with the die in particular,
they're still using Turing-based shader modules
on both these graphics cards right here.
The one on top however is going away
with the tensor cores and also ray tracing cores.
And so, with that, NVIDIA still wanted to keep
the floating-point 16 processors onboard the graphics card,
so they moved them from the tensor cores
into the shader modules themselves.
They've also changed up this graphics card versus the 1060
in terms of its cache structure, giving it access
to utilize threefold the max cache than the 1060.
They've also reduced the die size down
from the RTX 2060 to the 1660 Ti,
to 284 millimeters squared.
It still is using the 12-nanometer process,
but that allows it to get those power savings
with the IPC benefits of Turing cores
versus the GTX 10 series.
As we saw in that power consumption graph,
it was definitely doing a lot better
in terms of performance per watt
than the GTX 10 series was doing.
It also has 1,536 of these Turing cores on board.
And also, some powerful improvements they've made
to the 11 series card here versus the 10 series card,
is a parallel processing of floating-point units
besides the integers, as well as technically
making this a card that should theoretically
reduce input latency ever so slightly,
if we're looking at it from that perspective.
But they've also included adaptive shading,
a technology they are boasting about,
saying that it does make a big improvement
with Wolfenstein II, although for me personally,
I've uninstalled Wolfenstein, I've already finished it.
It's a game that's done and dusted.
And so, in relation to adaptive shading,
essentially how it works is,
it doesn't need to shade areas
that don't have that much detail
but otherwise would command the processing power
to utilize more resources than it should
in relation to the image quality.
So technically, with adaptive shading,
it makes the graphics card more efficient,
and that's what we're seeing with the 1660 Ti.
But I would like to see them focus with this technology
in games like Apex Legends
that are very popular at the moment
and have a huge player base.
I think this graphics card and the people who want to buy it
would love to see that happen.
Anyway guys, were here at conclusion time with the 1660 Ti.
It's currently coming in at $279.
This is what you can actually get it for too on Amazon,
so the from-pricing is accurate in this case.
In Australia it's coming well over $450 at the moment.
And when we adjust the U.S. dollar to Ozzie dollars,
I think it's overpriced at the moment in Australia.
I'd like to see it come down at least $50 in Oz,
it'd be good value at that price point.
The RTX 2060, of course,
you guys have seen the numbers here today.
Uses up 50 watts more, it performs
a little bit better than the 1660 Ti.
Pretty much performs better
than the Vega 56 and also the 1070.
So if you're in the market for a new graphics card
and you want that more performance
but you also wanna utilize ray tracing and DLSS,
then that's definitely a solid recommendation on the table.
In terms of Vega 56, there was this thing going around
where you could get it for under 300 U.S. dollars.
If you can get it for that price then go ahead and do it.
But I think that was only on one model
and it sold out instantly
or there wasn't even enough stock or something.
'Cause when I checked on Amazon,
Vega 56 cards are going for around 400 U.S. dollars,
and I'd much rather buy a 2060
than a Vega 56 at those prices.
And then we've got the 1070, which is very abundant
if you're looking for a deal.
If you know what you're doing with deal hunting,
this card here performs in a similar league to a 1660 Ti.
But of course, if you're to go on eBay and buy it now,
even on a used graphics card like this,
it's gonna cost you around maybe 250 U.S. dollars.
And honestly, at that price point
I'd much rather buy a 1660 Ti.
And then we've got the RX 590 here,
which unfortunately after today's review
and results that I've seen here,
I can't really recommend this thing.
It just got blown out of the water in terms of
power efficiency and also performance.
Except for Apex Legends where AMD graphics cards
are performing very well in Apex Legends at the moment.
Anyway guys, that wraps up the 1660 Ti review here.
This is the GALAX model,
big thanks to GALAX for sending this out.
I had little time to do this review,
this thing got to me pretty late,
hence why the review's late.
But this model itself is a stellar performer
as we saw with those noise and thermals
and overclocking headroom.
This is definitely a great implementation of a 1660 Ti.
But I mean, GALAX know exactly
what they're doing with GeForce cards.
All the cards that have come through here from them
have either been exceptional value
or exceptional performance,
in the case of the Hall of Fames, this one's no different.
And with that aside,
let us know in the comments section below
what you think of the GTX 1660 Ti.
Is it a card that you would be in the market for
or is it a card that you'll skip?
Love reading your thoughts and opinions as always.
And one more thing too,
there is actually no founders editions of the GTX 1660 Tis,
unlike the RTX series.
So, it's all custom models
that you're gonna see out there from the AIB partners.
So, just thought I'd add that into the end of this review.
And I'll catch you in another tech video very soon.
But also, if you enjoyed this one
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Tech YES City, for that inside scoop.
And I'll catch you in the next tech video very soon.
Peace out for now, bye.
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