Intro

The EVGA GTX 1660 Ti XC Black arrives to take on the Red Devil RX 590 & the GTX 1070 in a Mega-review with 40 games

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is the fifth GPU based on NVIDIA’s Turing architecture. There is no Founders Edition (FE) so it is represented by BTR’s review of the EVGA GTX 1660 Ti XC Black. It is the true successor to the GTX 1060 and it does not come with RT or Tensor cores which allows it to launch at $279, and its performance is supposed to approximate a $329 GTX 1070. It is $20 more expensive than the $259 Red Devil RX 590 which comes with a 3-game bundle from AMD, and so it is expected to outperform it.

The GTX 1660 Ti is NVIDIA’s new mainstream non-RTX Turing card and it will be available globally today starting at its $279 pricing and up for factory-overclocked cards. Like the GTX 1060 it replaces, the GTX 1660 Ti has 6GB of vRAM, but it is now equipped with GDDR6.

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We will highlight the differences between the GTX 1060, the RTX 2060, and the GTX 1660 Ti, and then we will focus on its performance by benchmarking it versus the Red Devil RX 590 and the GTX 1070 with an expanded 40-game benching suite including with Resident Evil 2 and Metro Exodus to see how capable it is.

We will pay particular attention to the GTX 1660 Ti’s performance versus its main and lower-priced competitor, the factory overclocked PowerColor Red Devil RX 590 at $259, and also versus the GTX 1070 at $329. We will also compare performance by using a total of eight video cards in BTR’s Big Picture, and will compare how far the GTX 1660 Ti has progressed versus the GTX 1060 SC at 1920×1080 and at 2560×1440.

The GTX 1660 Ti is based on its own Turing TU106 GPU but it has been modified to not have tensor nor RT cores so it is less complex and less expensive than the RTX 2060.

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti sports the Turing shader core which allows it to excel over Pascal in newer games with more complex shaders.

NVIDIA claims the GTX 1660 Ti is 1.5 times faster than the GTX 1060 and 3 times faster than the GTX 960. Here is a comparison of the GTX 1060 vs. the GTX 1660 Ti.

The GTX 1660 Ti features 1536 CUDA Cores and a minimum GPU Boost clock of 1770 MHz while the TDP is a modest 120 Watts and external power is provided by a single 8-pin power connector. Here are the GTX 1660 Ti specifications from NVIDIA’s chart.

The Black line-up is EVGA’s entry-level, non RGB video cards and they are stock-clocked with their specifications 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 Ti review sample on an extended loan from EVGA last week, and we have put it through its paces. We test all of our eight 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 Ti XC Black.