GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is NVIDIA's answer for the highly competitive sub-$300 segment. The card is based on the all-new TU116 graphics processor, which has specifically been 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.

As a result, when averaged over all our gaming benchmarks at 1080p, we see the Zotac GTX 1660 Ti match the Pascal-based GTX 1070 and end up a few percent behind AMD's RX Vega 56, which is pretty impressive for a mid-range card. While we don't have a GTX 1660 Ti reference-design, we expect this card to perform very closely to one because Zotac clocked their card at reference speed and didn't increase the board power limit. Compared to the RTX 2060, which is NVIDIA's next-fastest SKU, the Zotac GTX 1660 Ti is 18% behind. Compared to the GTX 1060 6 GB, which the GTX 1660 Ti replaces, the performance uplift is 30%, 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 20% 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.

Zotac's thermal solution is fairly simple to keep cost down, yet it achieves the best noise levels of all the GTX 1660 Ti cards we tested today. With 30 dBA, it is very quiet. Zotac achieved that by picking a good balance between temperatures and noise levels. There is no reason why a graphics card should run below 70°C, even if it has to use a cost-effective cooler in the first place. Rather, allow slightly higher temperatures and get better noise levels. Unfortunately, the card is missing the highly popular idle-fan-off feature, which turns off the fans completely during idle, Internet browsing, or light gaming. With the fans running in idle, the card is quiet though. Zotac doesn't include a backplate with their card, which is not unexpected for a card going for MSRP. MSI's Ventus XS, on the other hand, has a plastic backplate that only costs a fraction of a metal backplate and definitely helps with the overall look and feel of the product.

Compared to Pascal, Turing improved power-efficiency once more, and the GTX 1660 Ti is no exception. Zotac's GTX 1660 Ti runs at the NVIDIA default power limit of 120 W. While this costs a little bit of performance (1%, I'd say), it lets the card achieve oustanding efficiency levels. Even compared to the latest Turing GPUs, the Zotac card achieves 10% better performance per watt. Against AMD's Radeon RX 590, which was just recently released and uses a 12 nm production process too, the Zotac card is 2.5x more power-efficient; that's 250%!

Unlike other cards tested today, manual overclocking didn't go well with the Zotac card. For some unknown reason, it would crash instantly once we exceeded certain clocks on either the memory or GPU. Especially memory clocks were surprisingly low, despite a similar PCB design and the same memory chips. We're working with Zotac to investigate this, maybe a BIOS fix is possible. After manual overclocking, we still gained 9%, which isn't so bad even with the complications we ran into.

The lack of ray-tracing and DLSS on GTX 1660 Ti seems like a big deal at first, especially considering how much NVIDIA is pushing those technologies. While both are extremely promising, they are not the most important things to have right now, especially when 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 sub-$300 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 a great vehicle for NVIDIA to sell a feature that is more than just "higher FPS". Specifically, this targets people who are comfortable with 1080p 60 FPS and even playing at lower details if their GPU is affordable. If, however, they feel they miss out on visuals, something DX12 couldn't achieve, they might be willing 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. I also wouldn't be surprised to see NVIDIA haters on the forums who previously dismissed RTX as "useless" now ask "wut no RTX?"

Priced at $279, the Zotac GTX 1660 Ti comes at NVIDIA MSRP pricing, which is great because it makes the card much more competitive against other offerings, be it from AMD or NVIDIA (Pascal). Zotac's GTX 1660 Ti does compete with the RX 590, which it beats with ease: 30% faster, a fraction of the power consumption, and better fan noise. The RTX 2060 starts at $350, is 15% faster, and offers NVIDIA's RTX features, like ray-tracing and DLSS, which definitely make it an option if you can save up more money and are looking to play at 1440p. Strong competition has come in the past few days from AMD Vega 56, which has seen its price dropped 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 the GTX 1660 Ti. Looking at the board designs, I have no doubt that prices for the GTX 1660 Ti can go down much further, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it at or below $250 soon, at which point it would spark the upgrade-itch for many users, especially those with older cards, like the GeForce 900 series.