Colorful iGame GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Advanced OC review - Conclusion

Final words and verdict

Colorful offers a compelling product with the iGame Advanced edition, the product looks pretty terrific and is cooled well, (albeit not overly impressive for a 3-fan cooling design), it is, however, a more audible product at a rated 43 DBa. The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and lower SKUs are interesting. The performance sits in that GTX 1070 / Radeon Vega 56 domain with some wins and losses here and there. At a price of roughly 279 USD that normally is not a bad proposition. This version, however, does come at a price premium, currently, that is 310 EUR/USD. For the benefit of the cooler with a Boost frequency bump, I do feel that the 1660 Ti is a product series that should be under the 300 USD marker. 

Aesthetics

As stated the card does not come with fancy RGB options, just a logo lit at the top side and then the sizable cooler makes this product look as to what it is, rather big. If you look at the photo above you can see the aluminum fins, it would be nice to have these colored in black. The triple fan cooler has nice fans. The casing of the card including a backplate. If you have a dark metal styled build, this card could look excellent. It certainly matches our ASRock Tachi Z390 Ultima board we've tested on.

Cooling & acoustic levels

The card tops out at roughly only 66 Degrees C while gaming. So that's not bad at all but for a three fan cooler I had hoped for a little more, the acoustics I'd rate as moderate, you'll hear the card once active and seated in a closed chassis, but it is definitely not at an annoying level. We've heard no noticeable coil whine. But I do want to note that any graphics card at a high-enough FPS can make some coil whine. 

Overclocking

We've been able to push close to 7% of extra perf out of the card compared to the reference card. Both traditional overclocking, the OC Scanner was a notch lower but overall roughly remains at that near 10% level. The combination of memory, voltage settings will bring you a proper overclock. Once you've applied it, you get a few percent more performance. Nice to see is that we have been able to reach roughly ~14.5 Gbps on the memory, and that does help. The card overall seems to be slightly more limited on the power limiter, it's not a lot though and likely was needed due to the compact design. 

Concluding

We mentioned before that the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti series is definitely something the industry needed when released, pricing, however, needs to come down a notch further though for it to make actual sense. The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti addresses the issue of offering a more competitive product compared to the RTX series. It offers GeForce GTX 1070 performance (mostly slightly above it) at what should be a far more interesting price. NVIDIA, however, is in a split, they also have to face the reality that this is a product that performs at a product and a feature level they've been offering for a long time now. So who is going to step up from the GTX 1000 series? Well, anyone with a GTX 1050 or perhaps 1060. But for that last product group, the performance increase isn't heaps. So for the 1660 Ti series to become successful, the price needs to stay well below the 299 USD domain, period. The Colorful Advanced edition ticks most right boxes but is likely to be priced above that threshold price wise, I say likely as I have yet to spot a place selling it here in the EU. The OC model (remember that is a distinction) is clocked properly at 1860 MHz on the boost clock, however, remains awfully close to reference performance due to the many limiters that NVIDIA has in place. NVIDIA likes this card to stick at that 120 Watt TDP and as such even when tweaked will regulate the clock frequencies and voltages. We like the idea of that physical button at the front plate, default reference or OC mode to 1860 MHz and hey, you have a physical fallback if you fry a BIOS because of gawd knows what. Once you give it more power limiter allowance it will quickly throttle upwards in performance. The cooling is decent, 66 degrees C under load however with moderate acoustic levels. Overall we think it is a nice card that we could recommend if priced right. We would like to test more Colorful products in the future and hope they can focus a tad more on acoustics as other than that, this is a promising design. 

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