Palit GeForce GTX 1660 Ti StormX review (Page 32)

Palit GeForce GTX 1660 Ti StormX review

Graphics cards 1049 Page 32 of 32 Published 2019-02-22 15:00 by Hilbert Hagedoorn

Conclusion

Final words and verdict

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. So that's a good thing. The problem is that we have no idea how the retail price will develop. The StormX edition from Palit might not have the worlds most fancy cooler or PCB design, it however works well. It ticks the right boxes for a small form factor build, even Mini ITX, is fairly silent and offers stock performance while you may tweak it a bit as well. The looks are okay, there's no RGB implemented.

Aesthetics

As stated the card does not come with fancy RGB options and does not have the mega hyper cooler. If you look at the photo above you can actually see the aluminum fins. That's said, for the base MSRP product this really isn't a bad looking card IMHO + the small form factor is a big plus for many.

Cooling & acoustic levels

The card tops out at roughly only 65 Degrees C while gaming. So that's not bad at all, the acoustics I'd rate as normal to silent, we doubt you'll ever hear the card but if you listen carefully you can hear a bit of an airflow whir. We doubt you'd hear it when seated inside a close chassis though. 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 10% of extra perf out of the card compared to the reference card. Both traditional overclocking, as well as the OC Scanner reached roughly that 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, even 15 Gbps on the memory, and that does help. The card oveall 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 feel the new GeForce GTX 1660 Ti series is definitely something the industry needs. Most consumers have put RTX cards on hold due to the sales price of the range, which is very steep. The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti certainly addresses the issue of offering a more competitive product. 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 Palit card ticks all the right boxes for a compact build. next to that this is an MSRP price product, meaning it is a base-priced product series at 279 USD. For that money, you get nice performance and features with decent looks. Temps are fine, perf is fine and the acoustics normal. You are a bit more limited with a manual tweak, but relatively speaking we're talking about 2% maybe 3% difference in the tweaking result here. Overall it most definitely does not disappoint. The product is plenty fast for any day gaming up-to, say, the Quad HD monitor resolution of 2560x1440. The 6 GB of graphics memory seen over 8 GB really isn't a hindrance either as long as you stick to that (Wide) Quad HD domain. Looking at it from a competition point of view, the card positions itself in-between the two Vega cards, with its closest opponent being the Radeon Vega 56. The Raytracing and AI features like DLSS, of course, have been stripped away. While not a tweaking monster, there's little to complain about the StormX though. Decent aesthetics and baseline performance combined with normal cooling levels and acoustics. What's really nice though it has all these variables housed inside a 17cm cm design, and that is worthy of a recommendation.