With the GeForce GTX 1660, NVIDIA is clearly attacking AMD's Radeon RX 590 offering. The GTX 1660 is based on the same TU116 graphics processor we saw on the GTX 1660 Ti not too long ago. Besides shader count and clock frequencies, the biggest difference between both cards is certainly that the GTX 1660 uses GDDR5 memory, whereas the GTX 1660 Ti uses GDDR6. Unlike other GeForce RTX "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 larger caches, concurrent execution of float and integer operations, and adaptive/variable rate shading.

As a result, when averaged over all our gaming benchmarks at 1080p, we see the Colorful iGame GTX 1660 Ultra beat AMD's Radeon RX 590 by a solid 10% margin. The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and last generation's GTX 1070 are 11% faster. With 20% higher performance than the GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB at slightly higher pricing, the GTX 1660 is in a position to conclusively replace the GTX 1060 6 GB. Colorful gave their card the largest overclock of all currently available GTX 1660s, to 1860 MHz rated Boost, which is a 75 MHz increase. With these performance results, the GTX 1660 is a good choice for gamers running high details with a 1080p Full HD monitor. Compared to the GTX 1660 Ti, you do have to sacrifice a few settings to reach 60 FPS, but you'll save good money while doing so.

Colorful has engineered a dual-slot, triple-fan cooler that maximizes heatsink surface area by being bigger—while not being triple-slot. In terms of looks, the card looks very clean, using mostly straight lines paired with red highlights. Temperatures are great with 65°C, but gaming noise levels could be a bit lower. At 36 dBA, the card is the loudest GTX 1660 we tested, though noise levels are still much better than most cards using AMD GPUs. The majority of Colorful's customers are in Asia, China in particular. Gamers in this region don't care as much about noise levels and prefer lower temperatures as that makes them feel they have a more powerful card. From a technical perspective, there is no difference between temperatures in the 50-70 °C range; it has no meaningful impact on overclocking potential and longevity. Lower noise levels, on the other hand, give you a tangible benefit you will constantly notice during gaming and desktop work. The card also lacks the highly popular idle-fan-off feature that turns the fans off completely during idle, Internet browsing, or light gaming. Nevertheless, even with the fans running, the card will barely be audible in idle. What's great to see is that Colorful managed to include a metal backplate on a card that's priced at MSRP. This greatly improves the look and feel of the product.

Compared to Pascal, Turing improved power efficiency once more, and the GTX 1660 is no exception. Colorful's GTX 1660 uses only 123 W during gaming, which is even more impressive when you consider how much gaming performance the card has. Even compared to the latest Turing RTX GPUs, the GTX 1660 achieves 10% better performance per watt. Against AMD's Radeon RX 590, which was just recently released and uses a 12 nm production process as well, the GTX 1660 is 2.5x more power-efficient; that's 250%!

Our manual overclocking yielded substantial performance improvements that brought the card to performance levels higher than the GTX 1660 Ti. The GDDR5 memory overclocked especially well, reaching a 25% clock increase. Going beyond that was impossible, though, as the card would crash immediately when clocks were increased by just another MHz. This is strong evidence for some kind of accidental (or artificial) limit in the memory clocking configuration because you would usually start seeing rendering artifacts that increase in intensity as clocks are dialed up, ultimately leading to a crash when clocked even higher.

Colorful includes a dual BIOS feature on their card, which comes in handy when recovering from a failed BIOS flash. The second BIOS runs the same fan curve, but with lower clocks and a lower power limit, which limits its versatility greatly. The "Turbo" BIOS, which is active by default, is what you should use all the time to get the best performance out of the card. Overclockers will be happy to hear that the manual power-adjustment range is bigger than on most other GTX 1660 cards; it goes up to 156 W.

The lack of ray-tracing and DLSS on GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti seems like a big deal at first, especially considering how much NVIDIA is promoting those technologies. While both are extremely promising, they are not the most important things to have right now, especially in a market where every dollar matters. While I have no doubt that RTX support will be growing vastly, only a few titles support it at this time, so I don't think anyone could be blamed for skipping the tech for now, waiting for it to mature. Looking at silicon economics, including RTX/DLSS would have either driven die size (= cost) so high that reaching the targeted price point wouldn't be possible anymore, or the number of shader cores would have had to be reduced, which would have resulted in no performance improvement over AMD—NVIDIA went the other route. "RTX" is actually a great vehicle for NVIDIA to sell a feature that is more than just "higher FPS". This card specifically targets people who are comfortable with 1080p 60 FPS and won't mind even playing at lower details as long as their GPU is affordable. If, however, they feel they miss out on visuals, something DX12 couldn't achieve, they might be tempted to spend more and go for the RTX 2060, for example. The next step for NVIDIA is transitioning to the 7 nm production process, which increases density and should allow smaller GPUs to have RTX, too.

Priced at $220, the Colorful iGame GTX 1660 Ultra comes with no price increase over the NVIDIA MSRP, making it the most affordable and feature complete GTX 1660 card we have tested so far. For $220, you get a lot of graphics card: a larger cooler, metal backplate, dual BIOS, overclock out of the box, and increased power limits. If you're on a budget and don't mind the noise levels, which are higher than with competing GTX 1660 cards, you should definitely consider the Colorful iGame GTX 1660 Ultra. The only problem could be that Colorful cards are very hard to find outside of Asia. AMD's Radeon RX 590 will be a tough sale now with the GTX 1660 on the market. The GTX 1660 is faster, cooler, quieter, and cheaper. The only win for the RX 590 is that it comes with a strong three-game bundle, which could offset your cost significantly. NVIDIA doesn't bundle any games with the GTX 1660. I have no doubt that AMD will quickly adjust their pricing to address these changed market conditions. Radeon RX 570 and RX 580 have already seen price drops, down to $130 and $170, respectively. Especially the RX 570 is now at a price point so low that many people are going to be willing to overlook its shortcomings in performance and noise, and the two-out-of-three game bundle will help, too.