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 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 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 MSI GTX 1660 Gaming X beat AMD's Radeon RX 590 by a solid 11% 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 easily. MSI gave their card the largest overclock of all cards tested today, to 1860 MHz rated Boost, which is a 75 MHz increase. With those 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.

MSI's GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming X comes with the company's signature TwinFrozr cooler, which is dual-slot, dual-fan cooler. The cooler keeps the card at great temperatures of 67°C and uses well-balanced fan settings. With 30 dBA in gaming, noise levels are the lowest of all the cards tested today and better than any RX 590 you can find. MSI was also kind enough to include the highly popular idle-fan-off feature, which turns off the fans completely during idle, Internet browsing, or light gaming. The quiet cooler is no doubt an achievement due to Turing's amazing energy efficiency, which means less heat gets produced, so weaker (= cheaper) coolers can handle the heat output with ease. MSI's Gaming X is also the only card tested today that includes a metal backplate, which definitely helps improve the look and feel of the product. RGB lighting is included, too, for those who like it.

Compared to Pascal, Turing improved power efficiency once more, and the GTX 1660 is no exception. MSI's GTX 1660 uses only 113 W during gaming, which is even more impressive when you consider how much gaming performance the card has in it. 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, as you would usually start seeing rendering artifacts that increase in intensity as clocks get dialed up, ultimately leading to a crash when clocked even higher.

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 and waiting for it to mature more. 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 even mind 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 $249, the MSI GTX 1660 Gaming X comes at a $30 premium over the NVIDIA MSRP, which is quite a substantial increase when you look at it in percentages. For 14% more money, you get a cooler upgrade, idle-fan-stop, a backplate, and RGB lighting. Compared to the EVGA XC Ultra, which retails at $250, too, the MSI adds a backplate and RGB lighting, so I think it's a pretty fair price increase even though this shouldn't mean that you should blindly buy the card. The reality is that pricing matters a lot for the GTX 1660 target audience—some may be happy without fan stop, backplate, or RGB, as long as their card is as cheap as possible. The Gaming X is definitely a premium GTX 1660 that ticks all the important checkboxes. At $250, the card is relatively close to the GTX 1660 Ti, though, which starts at $280 and has 13% higher performance. It looks as though the aging GTX 1060 6 GB has finally found a worthy successor. The GTX 1660 offers better performance and efficiency, at a similar price point—NVIDIA will sell millions of these. AMD's Radeon RX 590 will be a tough sale now. 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 the 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 here there, too.