Maximum PC - USA (2019-06)

R&D

70 MAXIMUMPC JUN 2019 maximumpc.com

CHRISTIAN GUYTON, STAFF WRITER

AH, THE LONG-AWAITED arrival of the GeForce

GTX 1660 Ti. We’ve been waiting for this for

a while, and it’s great to see it finally here.

A mainstream GPU that strikes the perfect

balance between price and power, the GeForce

GTX 1660 Ti is Nvidia’s new mid-range graphics

card, capable of delivering top-notch 1080p

gaming while wisely dropping superfluities such

as ray-tracing support to keep the cost at a very

affordable level. And now that it’s arrived, we’re

itching to get it into a new build.

We’re going with the slightly pricier MSI

Gaming X GTX 1660 Ti for this build, netting

us better performance—but the regular 1660

will work just fine, too, if you’re trying to

make small savings. The mission was simple:

Assemble a fierce 1080p gaming machine

for a thousand dollars. Pushing it to higher

resolutions isn’t important here; frame rate and

general performance are the name of the game.

Because of this, we were able to go for slightly

more conservative pickings for the processor,

motherboard, and RAM—as is often the case, the

GPU is the champion of this build.

And what a champion it is. The 1660 checks in

at a comparable price to the older, slower GTX

1060, while this Ti variant is faster, and handles

overclocking well. It might sit below the RTX

models in speed, but with 6GB of memory and

trimmed fat in other areas, too, it’s excellent bang

for your buck. Keeping the price down proved

tricky when taking storage into consideration,

but eventually we had a list of ingredients. The

only thing left was to, as the title goes, build it.

THE CONCEPT

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS

Dawn of the

GeForce 1660 Ti

LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY

With the GeForce GTX 1660 series arriving, we’re aiming

to build a 1080p gaming powerhouse for $1,000