Intro

The EVGA GTX 1660 XC Gaming arrives to take on the Red Devil RX 590 in this mega 41-game review

The GTX 1660 is the sixth GeForce GPU based on NVIDIA’s Turing architecture. Just as with the GTX 1660 Ti, there is no Founders Edition (FE) so it is represented in this review by the factory overclocked EVGA GTX 1660 XC. The Turing 1660s are successors to the Pascal GTX 1060 and they are not equipped with RT nor Tensor cores which allows the GTX 1660 to launch at $229. It is aimed directly at the RX 590. Since the RTX 1660 Ti’s launch, RX 590s can now be found below $230 with a 3-game bundle.

The GTX 1660 is NVIDIA’s very latest mainstream non-RTX Turing card and it will be available globally today starting at its $229 pricing and up for factory-overclocked cards. The mildly overclocked EVGA GTX 1660 XC is priced at $229 with a $10 mail-in rebate plus a Grip game and EVGA skin bundle.

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Like the GTX 1060, the GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti each have 6GB of vRAM. In the EVGA line-up, they look almost identical.

We will highlight the GTX 1660’s differences between the GTX 1060, the RTX 2060, the GTX 1660 Ti, and afterward we will focus on its performance. We will benchmark it versus the $259 Red Devil RX 590 with an expanded 41-game benching suite which now includes Devil May Cry 5 and Metro Exodus to see how capable it is at 1920×1080 and at 2560×1440. We also want to see how the GTX 1660 performs compared with a Galaxy GTX 970 EXOC.

The GTX 1660 and the GTX 1660 Ti are both based on their own Turing TU106 GPU without tensor nor RT cores so they are less complex and less expensive than the RTX 2060. The GeForce GTX 1660s feature the Turing shader core which allows them to exceed Pascal performance in newer games with more complex shaders. TU116 includes support for Concurrent Floating Point and Integer Operations, a Unified Cache Architecture with larger L1 cache, and Adaptive Shading. NVIDIA claims that the GTX 1660 is 68% faster overall than the GTX 970 so we will check it out.

The TDP of GTX 1660 and Ti are each only 120 watts which makes them an easy upgrade from a GTX 970 or GTX 960 as long as the same PSU has an 8-pin power connector. The GTX 1660 Ti features 1536 CUDA Cores and a minimum GPU Boost clock of 1770 MHz as shown by NVIDIA’s chart below.

The GTX 1660 has 1,408 CUDA cores, down from the GTX 1660 Ti’s 1536. While the GTX 1660 Ti uses 6GB of GDDR6, the GTX 1660 uses slower 6GB of GDDR5 memory with a 192-bit memory bus, for a combined memory bandwidth of 192GB/sec which is down considerably from the Ti’s 288.1GB/s. Base and boost clocks are 1530MHz and 1785MHz, respectively which are just a notch up above the Ti’s clocks. Here are the GTX 1660 specifications from NVIDIA’s charts.

The EVGA GTX 1660 XC Gaming edition is factory overclocked with a 45MHz offset over the stock core and its specifications are as below. EVGA offers some of the best warranty and RMA support anywhere. A three year warranty is offered with a further extension possible upon registration.

BTR received a GTX 1660 review sample on an extended loan from EVGA on Monday, and we have put it through its paces. We test all ten of our cards with recent drivers on a clean installation of Windows 10 64-bit Home edition, using a Core i7-8700K with all six cores overclocked to 4.7 GHz by the BIOS, and 16GB of Kingston’s 3333MHz DDR4.

First, let’s unbox the EVGA GTX 1660 XC Gaming.