Introduction

NVIDIA launched its GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card, doubling down on its idea of Turing-based GeForce GTX graphics cards that lack ray-tracing capabilities, but feature performance uplifts at normal raster graphics. At $280, the GTX 1660 Ti from last month ended up leagues ahead of the similarly priced and recently launched Radeon RX 590 and capable of playing any game at 1080p with details maxed out, and 1440p with a little tweaking. At its price point, though, the GTX 1660 Ti wasn't really a successor to the current mainstream market leader—the GTX 1060 6 GB—in terms of sheer sales. That distinction now goes to the GTX 1660.

At $220, the GTX 1660 is built to a cost, and NVIDIA has made sure it has ample headroom to cut costs further in the future if AMD comes out with competitive products in this segment, such as the fabled "Navi." It is carved out of the same 12 nm "TU116" silicon as the GTX 1660 Ti with fewer CUDA cores and slower 8 Gbps GDDR5 memory replacing 12 Gbps GDDR6. NVIDIA is hence looking to offer a product that is incrementally faster than the GTX 1060 6 GB and anything AMD has to offer in this segment, which can still deliver on Full HD gameplay with maximum quality.



As we detailed the "TU116" in our GTX 1660 Ti reviews, this silicon is derived from the "Turing" architecture by removing RT cores and tensor cores, leaving just the CUDA cores which have the same IPC and clock-speed uplifts as any other RTX 20-series card. The target audience for the GTX 1660 is that colossal mass of gamers into online multiplayer e-Sports titles and in need of just a card that can keep them ticking at Full HD, or perhaps even high refresh rates.

NVIDIA carved the GTX 1660 out of the "TU116" silicon by disabling 2 out of 24 streaming multiprocessors, resulting in a CUDA core count of 1,408 and 88 TMUs, which is still higher than what the "Pascal" based GTX 1060 6 GB packs. With 48 ROPs and a 192-bit GDDR5 memory bus driving 6 GB of memory, the rendering and memory subsystem is practically carried over.

Today, we are reviewing the MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ventus XS OC, which is the company's offering targeting NVIDIA's MSRP of $220, while still including an overclock out of the box and a backplate.