GeForce GTX 1660 Graphics Cards Now Available – New Bang For Buck Gaming Graphics Card

Last month, NVIDIA released a new GPU based on the new Turing architecture that doesn’t feature any RT and Tensor Cores – the GeFore GTX 1660 Ti. Just three weeks later (today), NVIDIA released a non-Ti variant – the GeForce GTX 1660, featuring just a few less CUDA cores and a different memory configuration. While the GTX 1660 Ti is the direct successor of the GTX 1060 6GB, the GTX 1660 (non-Ti) is the successor of the GTX 1060 3GB. The GeForce GTX 1660 is geared towards 1080p gaming and comes with a starting retail price of $219 USD, making it around 21.51% cheaper than the GTX 1660 Ti. Check out more details about the new GeForce GTX 1660 and whether you should buy this graphics card or not.

GeForce GTX 1660 Graphics Card New 1080p Budget Graphics Card

Like the GTX 1660 Ti, The GeForce GTX 1660 is based on the new NVIDIA Turing architecture with a TU116 Turing GPU on the heart of the graphics card. While it doesn’t have any RT and Tensor cores for real-time ray tracing and DLSS, the GTX 1660 does feature the Turing Shader that improve performance and efficiency, including support for Concurrent Floating Point and Integer Operations, a Unified Cache Architecture with larger L1 cache, and Adaptive Shading.

The GeForce GTX 1660 is like a cut down version of the GTX 1660 Ti. It features 22 Streaming Multiprocessors (24 on the 1660 Ti) and 1408 CUDA cores (1536 on the 1660 Ti). It does have a slightly higher clock speeds of 1530MHz base and 1785MHz boost. It also has 6GB of memory, however it’s using an older and slower GDDR5 memory instead of GDDR6 that is on the GTX 1660 Ti.

Memory clock and memory bandwidth of a GDDR5 memory is indeed slower compared to a GDDR6 memory. However, in the case of the GTX 1660 it doesn’t seem to impact the performance much. The GTX 1660 Ti is still overall faster than the non-Ti, but the GTX 1660 is generally faster than the GTX 1060 6GB and 3GB, as well as AMD’s RX 590 and RX 580.

It seems that AMD can no longer compete at this price range and level of performance. While the performance difference between the RX 590 and GTX 1660 isn’t that huge, I see some RX 590 / 580 that are similarly price and sometimes higher than the GTX 1660. Not to mention, the GTX 1660 (Ti) is much more power efficient and runs cooler compared to any AMD RX 590/580 graphics card. The GTX 1660 is, currently, the better choice compared to a GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB/3GB) and AMD RX 590 / RX 580.

In terms of performance, the GTX 1660 is around 10% (or more) faster than the RX 590, while being cheaper and more efficient at the same time. It’s also around 15%-20% faster than the GTX 1060, depending on the game or scenario. So if you’re coming from a GTX 1060 6GB card, it may not be a huge upgrade (more like a “side-grade”). It’s better to upgrade to a much faster card like the RTX 2060 or higher. But if you’re coming from a much older card, like the GTX 960, you may want to consider the GTX 1660 or GTX 1660 Ti for your next upgrade. Assuming that your budget is around $300 or less and you’re playing at 1080p.

Like the GTX 1660 Ti, there is no Founders Edition available. So it’s up to the AIB partners to impress us. There are already several GeForce GTX 1660 available from EVGA, MSI, Zotac, Gigabyte and Asus. Currently, I see GTX 1660 graphics cards priced from $230 up to around $250. If you are comfortable with overclocking, better get a good GTX 1660, overclock it and get gaming performance near a stock GTX 1660 Ti. However, if you are not comfortable in manually overclocking your graphics card, but you want to get a bit more performance, the GTX 1660 Ti is the better choice, especially if you are using a 1080p high refresh rate monitor or a 1440p monitor.

The GeForce GTX 1660 is an ideal graphics card for 1080p gaming. Not so much for 1080p high refresh monitors though. Not unless you’re just playing eSports title games that are fairly easy to drive. Below, I have listed some of the GeForce GTX 1660 that are now available to order in the US. Go ahead and check them out. You may also want to check out our review of the MSI GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X.

GeForce GTX 1660 Pricing and Availability

The GeForce GTX 1660 comes with a starting retail price of $219 USD. Again, there’s no Founders Edition so better get the “better” GTX 1660 from AIB partners. Check out the latest pricing and availability via the links below.

GeForce GTX 1660 Specifications