okay so humor me for a minute here um my son's in grade one now and one of the
things they're doing in his class is pattern recognition so he brings home
his homework and he'll have a problem that looks a little something like this
now if he wrote 1660 ti as the answer to that question
i'd probably say something like why don't you think about it some more
and then try again and yet somehow he'd be right
so what in the sam fool is a gtx
1660 ti and
oh i don't know i mean who cares what they
call it if the product is good right so let's see if it is
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right off the bat some of you eagle-eyed viewers probably noticed that this
is not a founder's edition and there's a good reason for that there isn't one
NVIDIA left this launch entirely up to its board partners and that means that
we are going to see a pretty wide variety of designs ASUS alone has four
but contrary to the eec filings that were spotted prior to the launch the
core specs of all of them are going to be the same so there's no weird
variations with cut down memory to confuse people
for now not that there won't be any confusion
what the actual is up with the name of this thing
1660 ti the best guess that we came up with is
that it has 16 fp16 and 16 fp32 cores
but then when we asked NVIDIA their official response
after playing koi and pretending not to know that it wasn't perfectly normal was
that they chose it to differentiate it from the rtx 2060
which is almost as stupid as the way that they then giggled about it like
school children because there was a real reason that they couldn't tell us
so tldr for those interested is that it is
some kind of inside joke and knowing those guys it's probably a dirty one
kind of like how GeForce experience obviously shortens to gf or girlfriend
experience a more premium prostitution service where she pretends to be
genuinely interested in you instead of just having quick sex and leaving
so cool i guess why don't we move on specs wise at the
1660s heart is the more sensibly named tu-116 GPU which NVIDIA claims is not
simply a tu-106 with some features cut out but rather a brand new GPU
engineered from the ground up without the machine learning tensor or real-time
ray tracing rt course from the rtx
series it's got 20 percent fewer cuda cores
than the rtx 2060 so on the surface it looks like it'll be much slower even in
conventional games without rtx on
but thankfully just like we saw with the Radeon 7 compared to vega 64 we are also
treated to a hefty core clock increase which should help make up some ground
especially considering that we will still get all of the other touring
goodies cash improvements variable rate shader rendering concurrent floating
point and integer processing and perhaps
most importantly for the entry-level game streamers out there that new
touring and bank engine that provides image quality comparable to CPU driven
x264 that crispy gameplay footage
now we're only going to use one test bench today to keep things a little
simpler than our Radeon 7 review but it
should give you a good idea of where this card falls
and the gaming results look very promising
at 1080p we are seeing equivalent or better performance than the gtx 1070
across the board and titles that are designed with simultaneous floating
point and integer math in mind like shadow of the tomb raider see a pretty
big performance boost it's especially important to consider here that the gtx
1070 has 384 more cuda cores than the new 1660 ti
that's impressive and these results even carried over to
our 1440p testing where we got playable
if less consistent frame rates on this very mid-range card this is the
generational improvement that we had been looking for in touring up until now
it's just taken NVIDIA this long to strip out some of those cost adding
features that many gamers don't want to pay more for right now
when we move on to productivity though the gtx 1660 ti falters somewhat now it
does at least keep up with the 1070 that it's looking to usurp in most tasks with
longer blender renders being a particularly strong point but in other
tests like luxmark and most of specuperf
we're looking at significantly less consistency it does come out ahead
sometimes but then also significantly behind in other times
in fairness though i guess we should expect this from a card that has fewer
cuda cores but then executes combined math instructions more efficiently with
a more efficient cache setup as for thermals well
this high-end board design from ASUS represents a best case scenario with a
seriously overbuilt cooler so i won't spend too much time talking about it but
what we can glean a bit of information from is the power draw this card draws
nearly 10 watts less power on the 12
volt connector than the rtx 2060 and
even less than the gtx 1070 which if you'll recall it meets or exceeds in
terms of performance not a bad result
and it gets even better even our pre-factory overclocked card had some
headroom for overclocking with oc scanner and with more direct tuning it
could probably go a little further silicon lottery willing
so then let's answer the big question here was video right to be truly teed
off with me when i concluded my rtx 2060
review by recommending that our viewers simply wait for this card which at that
time was a mere rumor that did they deny it no they just refused to
comment on it well even ignoring the missing features
that define the rtx cards from a price to performance standpoint things are
actually a little blurry here so our top of the line ASUS card here
costs 329 that is just 20 bucks cheaper than a
reference rtx 2060. honestly that makes the ray tracing and
tensor core equipped version the obvious choice in every scenario so as usual the
premium versions of mainstream products don't make a ton of sense
but when we drop down to the reference model at 279 which should perform pretty
much the same the gtx 1660s value
proposition becomes a little more clear it outpaces AMD's rx 590 at a similar
price and it outpaces the gtx 1070 which
launched at a hundred dollars more and currently sells for 300
so for folks looking for an upgrade from a 9 or a lower end 10 series card
hey a card that cost less than 300 for that kind of performance is an excellent
value proposition the only problem is that if you're
ponying up for a whole new system rather than upgrading by our numbers it's
basically a no-brainer to spend the extra seventy dollars on an rtx 2060.
we're actually planning a full video where we talk about this particular
value calculation sometime in the future
in conclusion though well played NVIDIA you guys managed to
deliver just the right amount of value to edge
out the competition and no more you
truly are team green
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