Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming OC review (Page 32)

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming OC review

Graphics cards 1049 Page 32 of 32 Published 2019-04-17 15:50 by Hilbert Hagedoorn

Conclusion

Final words and verdict

Gigabyte offers a decent product with the Gaming OC edition, the products are cooled well, (albeit not overly impressive for a 3-fan product) and are relatively silent. The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and lower SKUs (yes, they will be released) are interesting. The performance sits in that GTX 1070 / Radeon Vega 56 range with some wins and losses here and there. At a price of 279 USD that really is not a bad proposition. The Gaming OC version, however, does come at a price premium, currently, that is 310~320 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 dark aesthetics. The casing of the card including a backplate, it's all plastic though. So overall the card is not hyper fancy, but an okay looking card.

Cooling & acoustic levels

The card tops out at roughly only 65 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 normal, we doubt you'll ever hear the card once seated in a closed chassis, but if you listen carefully you can hear a bit of an airflow whir. 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 11% of extra perf out of the card compared to the reference card. Both traditional overclocking, the OC Scanner was a little lower but overall roughly remains at that 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 needs, 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 below the 299 USD domain, period. The Gigabyte Gaming OC edition ticks most right boxes but is priced above that threshold. The OC model (remember that is a distinction) is clocked properly at 1860 Mhz on the boost clock. That's Strix OC and Gaming X territory. The cooling is decent, 65 degrees C under load with fairly normal to low acoustic levels. Pricing, however, remains bothersome, at 320 EUR/USD if you can find many models at a better price, we'd recommend that of course. The reference MSRP 1660 Ti products will sell for roughly 279 USD. It's a good card with a nice factory tweak as well. So yeah, that did not disappoint us either, worthy of a recommendation but the pricing remains trivial.