GETTING MORE performance at a lower
price is great, but with graphics cards,
there’s always a problem of competing
with the previous generation. The GTX
1660 is faster than the GTX 1060 6GB, but
it’s not a massive upgrade. Instead, it’s
better positioned as a replacement for
an old GTX 960 or earlier GPU; if you’re
using such a card, this a great upgrade,
while anyone with a GTX 970 or better will
probably want to wait a little longer.
The GPU at the heart of the GTX 1660
is the same TU116 as in the 1660 Ti,
with two of the SMs disabled. Perhaps
more interesting is when you compare
it with the GP106 used in the GTX 1060.
Transistor counts increased from 4.4
billion to 6.6 billion, and die size also
went up. In practice, TSMC’s 12nm
doesn’t appear to be much more than a
refinement of its 16nm tech—what Intel
would have called 16nm+.
The Zotac Gaming GTX 1660 is nothing
fancy, though it does have dual fans for
cooling. It’s basically a mini-sized card
that can easily fit inside small cases,
measuring just 6.83 inches in length. It’s a
dual-slot design, and while it’s technically
not required, the card uses a single
eight-pin PEG power connector. For
video outputs, Zotac provides one HDMIGDDR5 allows for a truly
mainstream price point,
balancing value against
performance
Zotac Gaming
GeForce GTX 1660
9
VERDICT Zotac Gaming GeForce
GTX 1660
DUAL FAN Great for 1080p
gaming; affordable; efficient and quiet.
CRUEL SHAM Modest gains over 1060 6GB;
not a true budget GPU price; some games
use more than 6GB.
$220, http://www.zotac.comSPECIFICATIONSGPU Turing TU116
Lithography TSMC 12nm FinFET
Transistor Count 6.6 billion
CUDA Cores 1,408
Texture Units 88
ROPs 48
Core/Boost Clock 1,530/1,785MHz
Memory Capacity & Type 6GB GDDR5
Memory Speed 8GT/s
Memory Bus 192-bitZotac Gaming GeForce GTX 1660 Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070
Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (Avg fps) 46/36 52 / 38
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (Avg fps) 55/38 65 / 45
Far Cry 5 (Avg fps) 82/56 101 / 70
Grand Theft Auto 5 (Avg fps) 64/43 77 / 54
Metro Exodus (Avg fps) 46/34 56 / 42
Middle Earth: Shadow of War (Avg fps) 61/42 74 / 50
Total War: Warhammer II (Avg fps) 65/47 87 / 61BENCHMARKSBest scores are in bold. Our test bed consists of an Intel Core i7-7800K, 16GB of G.Skill DDR4-3200, a Gigabyte
Z370 Aorus Gaming 7, and a 1TB Samsung 970 Evo M.2. All games are tested at their highest graphical profile
with AA turned up, at 1080p and 1440p.2.0b port, along with three DisplayPort
1.4 ports, and it can run all four outputs
simultaneously. If you have an older
monitor that requires a DVI-D connection,
you’ll have to bring your own adapter.
There are no lights, no dual VBIOS chips,
or any other higher-end features. This is
a no-frills card that provides everything
you need, at Nvidia’s base $219 price.
The GTX 1660 uses GDDR5 memory,
so it’s not going to come anywhere near
matching a 1660 Ti. With the Zotac GTX
1660, performance in games with the
overclocked GPU is about 10 percent
faster than at stock. Individual results
will vary from that a little, but it’s a
reasonable baseline estimate. There will
likely be factory overclocked models that
will run faster on the core and memory
clocks, and hit slightly higher speeds.
The GTX 1660 does best though, when
prices are kept closer to $200 than
$250—at $250, you’re probably better off
just moving up to a GTX 1660 Ti.
Starting at 1080p, performance of the
GTX 1660 is good. It’s about 12 percent
faster than the outgoing GTX 1060 6GB,
so nothing major, but at least it’s both
faster and less expensive. There are a
few games where the GTX 1660 isn’t able
to average 60fps or more at 1080p ultra,but that’s only in notoriously punishing
games such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
and Metro Exodus. Overall, it’s a very
capable 1080p gaming card—better than
the 1060 6GB that launched a couple of
years back, but not tremendously so.
1440p ultra is mostly a miss for the GTX- Some games can break 60fps, but
most run at closer to 45fps. Dropping
the image quality can get the card back
to 60fps, but it’s better to stick with
1080p. 4K ultra is basically out of the
question—the 6GB of VRAM becomes an
issue with 4K ultra, games running out of
VRAM and being forced to swap data out
to system RAM.
The GTX 1660 takes over for Nvidia
as the new “sweet spot” for mainstream
GPUs. That’s why the cards use GDDR5—
supply and pricing on GDDR5X and
GDDR6 apparently “wasn’t enough” to
meet the expected demand. And there’s
a large chunk of PC gamers running far
less capable hardware, so anyone with a
GTX 960 or lower may finally be tempted
to make the switch. Or not, since it’s
still only a minor bump in performance
relative to the GTX 1060 6GB for only a
slightly better price.
Rather than upgrades, the biggest
draw for the GTX 1660 will be with new
builds—newcomers looking to set up a
budget gaming PC will find plenty to like
with this. It’s not going to bring home any
pink slips in a race, but if all you’re looking
for is a good 1080p gaming experience,
this will do. –JARRED WALTON
in the lab
76 MAXIMUMPC JUN 2019 maximumpc.com