Nvidia, I’m Sorry. GTX 1660 Ti Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,476 words · ~7 min read
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okay so humor me for a minute here um my son's in grade one now and one of the
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things they're doing in his class is pattern recognition so he brings home
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his homework and he'll have a problem that looks a little something like this
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now if he wrote 1660 ti as the answer to that question
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i'd probably say something like why don't you think about it some more
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and then try again and yet somehow he'd be right
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so what in the sam fool is a gtx
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1660 ti and
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oh i don't know i mean who cares what they
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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
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is not a founder's edition and there's a good reason for that there isn't one
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NVIDIA left this launch entirely up to its board partners and that means that
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we are going to see a pretty wide variety of designs ASUS alone has four
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but contrary to the eec filings that were spotted prior to the launch the
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core specs of all of them are going to be the same so there's no weird
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variations with cut down memory to confuse people
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for now not that there won't be any confusion
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what the actual is up with the name of this thing
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1660 ti the best guess that we came up with is
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that it has 16 fp16 and 16 fp32 cores
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but then when we asked NVIDIA their official response
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after playing koi and pretending not to know that it wasn't perfectly normal was
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that they chose it to differentiate it from the rtx 2060
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which is almost as stupid as the way that they then giggled about it like
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school children because there was a real reason that they couldn't tell us
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so tldr for those interested is that it is
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some kind of inside joke and knowing those guys it's probably a dirty one
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kind of like how GeForce experience obviously shortens to gf or girlfriend
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experience a more premium prostitution service where she pretends to be
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genuinely interested in you instead of just having quick sex and leaving
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so cool i guess why don't we move on specs wise at the
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1660s heart is the more sensibly named tu-116 GPU which NVIDIA claims is not
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simply a tu-106 with some features cut out but rather a brand new GPU
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engineered from the ground up without the machine learning tensor or real-time
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ray tracing rt course from the rtx
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series it's got 20 percent fewer cuda cores
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than the rtx 2060 so on the surface it looks like it'll be much slower even in
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conventional games without rtx on
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but thankfully just like we saw with the Radeon 7 compared to vega 64 we are also
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treated to a hefty core clock increase which should help make up some ground
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especially considering that we will still get all of the other touring
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goodies cash improvements variable rate shader rendering concurrent floating
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point and integer processing and perhaps
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most importantly for the entry-level game streamers out there that new
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touring and bank engine that provides image quality comparable to CPU driven
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x264 that crispy gameplay footage
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now we're only going to use one test bench today to keep things a little
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simpler than our Radeon 7 review but it
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should give you a good idea of where this card falls
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and the gaming results look very promising
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at 1080p we are seeing equivalent or better performance than the gtx 1070
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across the board and titles that are designed with simultaneous floating
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point and integer math in mind like shadow of the tomb raider see a pretty
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big performance boost it's especially important to consider here that the gtx
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1070 has 384 more cuda cores than the new 1660 ti
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that's impressive and these results even carried over to
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our 1440p testing where we got playable
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if less consistent frame rates on this very mid-range card this is the
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generational improvement that we had been looking for in touring up until now
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it's just taken NVIDIA this long to strip out some of those cost adding
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features that many gamers don't want to pay more for right now
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when we move on to productivity though the gtx 1660 ti falters somewhat now it
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does at least keep up with the 1070 that it's looking to usurp in most tasks with
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longer blender renders being a particularly strong point but in other
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tests like luxmark and most of specuperf
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we're looking at significantly less consistency it does come out ahead
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sometimes but then also significantly behind in other times
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in fairness though i guess we should expect this from a card that has fewer
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cuda cores but then executes combined math instructions more efficiently with
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a more efficient cache setup as for thermals well
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this high-end board design from ASUS represents a best case scenario with a
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seriously overbuilt cooler so i won't spend too much time talking about it but
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what we can glean a bit of information from is the power draw this card draws
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nearly 10 watts less power on the 12
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volt connector than the rtx 2060 and
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even less than the gtx 1070 which if you'll recall it meets or exceeds in
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terms of performance not a bad result
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and it gets even better even our pre-factory overclocked card had some
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headroom for overclocking with oc scanner and with more direct tuning it
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could probably go a little further silicon lottery willing
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so then let's answer the big question here was video right to be truly teed
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off with me when i concluded my rtx 2060
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review by recommending that our viewers simply wait for this card which at that
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time was a mere rumor that did they deny it no they just refused to
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comment on it well even ignoring the missing features
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that define the rtx cards from a price to performance standpoint things are
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actually a little blurry here so our top of the line ASUS card here
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costs 329 that is just 20 bucks cheaper than a
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reference rtx 2060. honestly that makes the ray tracing and
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tensor core equipped version the obvious choice in every scenario so as usual the
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premium versions of mainstream products don't make a ton of sense
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but when we drop down to the reference model at 279 which should perform pretty
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much the same the gtx 1660s value
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proposition becomes a little more clear it outpaces AMD's rx 590 at a similar
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price and it outpaces the gtx 1070 which
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launched at a hundred dollars more and currently sells for 300
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so for folks looking for an upgrade from a 9 or a lower end 10 series card
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hey a card that cost less than 300 for that kind of performance is an excellent
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value proposition the only problem is that if you're
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ponying up for a whole new system rather than upgrading by our numbers it's
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basically a no-brainer to spend the extra seventy dollars on an rtx 2060.
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we're actually planning a full video where we talk about this particular
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value calculation sometime in the future
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in conclusion though well played NVIDIA you guys managed to
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deliver just the right amount of value to edge
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out the competition and no more you
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truly are team green
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