The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is NVIDIA's answer for the highly competitive sub-$300 segment. The card is based on the smallest Turing chip so far, the TU116. It has been specifically designed to meet the demands of that market, which is mostly price. Unlike other Turing GPUs, TU116 does not feature acceleration for RTX real-time raytracing or DLSS because the specialized hardware consumes a significant portion of the die area on other Turing GPUs, which increases manufacturing cost significantly. NVIDIA did keep the other improvements of Turing though, like GDDR6 memory, larger caches, concurrent execution of float and integer operations, and adaptive/variable rate shading. NVIDIA also announced last week that they will bring DirectX Raytracing support to GTX 16 and GTX 10 Series GPUs, which of course will run at slower speeds, but at least you get to check out the new tech.

The ASUS GeForce GTX 1660 Ti comes overclocked out of the box to a rated boost clock of 1815 MHz, which turns into an average clock of 1917 MHz during our game tests. Gaming performance is quite good, around 5% higher than the base unoverclocked GTX 1660 Ti models, which helps make up ground against Radeon RX Vega 56. In the end, when averaged over all our gaming benchmarks at 1080p, the difference to RX Vega 56 is 1%—pretty much identical. Against last-generation's GeForce GTX 1070, the ASUS STRIX has a 5% advantage. The faster GTX 1070 Ti is 9% ahead. Compared to the GTX 1060 6 GB, which the GTX 1660 Ti replaces, the performance uplift is 40%, although at a higher price point. AMD just released the RX 590, on a 12 nanometer process no less, to address the growing requirements of the mid-range segment, and the GTX 1660 Ti makes short shrift of that, offering 30% more performance. With those performance results, the GTX 1660 Ti is a great choice for gamers running maximum details with a Full HD monitor. If you are willing to dial down detail settings a bit, it should be able to reach 60 FPS at 1440p in most titles, too.

ASUS is using a large thermal solution on their flagship STRIX OC card. The triple-slot, triple-fan cooler is massive and bigger than on any other GTX 1660 Ti we tested so far. That's why it's not surprising to see the card beat all other cards in terms of temperatures and fan noise. ASUS does include a dual BIOS feature, which defaults to the "Performance" BIOS. The second BIOS is for users who want a quieter card. What I find a little bit surprising is that only the "quiet" BIOS comes with idle fan stop, which turns off the fans completely during idle, Internet browsing, or light gaming. Gaming noise levels are good with the default BIOS and outstanding with the "quiet" BIOS—only 29 dBA at full load is almost whisper quiet. We tested for performance differences between the quiet and performance BIOS and found that they are nearly identical in performance, less than 1% on average. So I'd recommend that you run the "quiet" BIOS at all times because it gives you a tangible benefit: less noise while only increasing temperatures by 7°C—from 58°C to 65°C, which has no effect on the lifetime of the card.

The ASUS card does tick a lot of feature checkboxes. For example, it has voltage measurement points for volt-modders, and the previously mentioned dual-BIOS feature. Another useful feature can be the two fan headers that let you connect case fans to your graphics card, and they'll run at the same speed as the card's own fans, which should help with noise when not gaming, while still providing airflow when the card is heavily loaded. Last but not least, the card offers RGB lighting on the backplate, and you may connect other components in your system to it so that colors are matched.

Compared to Pascal, Turing improved power efficiency once more, and the GTX 1660 Ti is no exception. The ASUS STRIX delivers outstanding performance per watt, just like all other GTX 1660 Ti cards. Compared to the base models, efficiency is a bit lower because ASUS increased their board power limit, which nets additional performance by letting the card boost higher, for longer, though at the cost of a little bit of efficiency. Given the card still only needs 130 W in gaming, I'd say that's a good thing. Also worth mentioning is that the STRIX OC gives you the largest manual power limit adjustment range of all GTX 1660 Ti cards tested so far, up to 156 W.

Manual overclocking worked well, netting around 9% in real-life performance, most of which is due to the enormous overclock these GDDR6 memory chips can take—we went from 1500 MHz to 1940 MHz. GPU overclocking reached an average clock of 2034 MHz when gaming, which is in the expected range for GTX 1660 Ti overclocking.

Priced at $330, the ASUS GTX 1660 Ti STRIX OC is too expensive. Yes, it comes with a ton of features and is the best GTX 1660 Ti we have tested so far (as long as you don't look at pricing). The problem is that for just $20 more, you can get an RTX 2060, which is 13% faster and comes with RTX acceleration and DLSS; definitely an option if you can save up more money and are looking to play at 1440p. Strong competition also comes from the MSI GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X, which is $20 cheaper and very similar in terms of performance and features. Last but not least, AMD has reduced pricing of Vega 56 down to $330 (€269 including VAT in some European countries). This of course makes a compelling argument for people looking for price/performance, but Vega 56 runs much hotter and noisier than GTX 1660 Ti.