Zotac Gaming Geforce GTX 1660
Jarred Walton says the decision to go with GDDR5 memory balances value against performance in this new mainstream gaming card.
Jarred Walton say GDDR5 balances value against performance when he takes a look at the gaming performance of Nvidia’s latest mid-range graphics card.
Getting more performance at a lower price is great, but with graphics cards, there’s always a problem of competing with the previous generation. The GTX 1660 is faster than the GTX 1060 6GB, but it’s not a massive upgrade. Instead, it’s better positioned as a replacement for an older GTX 960 or earlier GPU; if you’re using such a card, this a great upgrade, while anyone with a GTX 970 or better will probably want to wait a little longer.
The GPU at the heart of the GTX 1660 is the same TU116 as in the 1660 Ti, with two of the Streaming Multiprocessors disabled. Perhaps more interesting is when you compare it with the GP106 used in the GTX 1060. Transistor counts have increased from 4.4 billion to 6.6 billion, and the die size also went up.
The Zotac Gaming Geforce GTX 1660 is nothing fancy, though it does have dual fans for cooling. It’s basically a mini-sized card that can easily fit inside smaller cases, measuring just 17.3cm in length. It’s a dual-slot design, and while it’s technically not required, the card uses a single eight-pin PEG power connector.
The GTX 1660 uses GDDR5 memory, so it’s not going to come anywhere near matching a 1660 Ti. Starting at 1080p, performance of the Zotac Gaming GTX 1660 is good. It’s about 12 per cent faster than the outgoing GTX 1060 6GB, so nothing major, but at least it’s both faster and less expensive. There are a few games in which the Zotac GTX 1660 isn’t able to average 60fps or more at 1080p ultra settings, but that’s only in notoriously punishing games such as Deus Ex: Mankind
Divided. Overall, it’s a very capable 1080p gaming card – better than the 1060 6GB that launched a couple of years back, but not tremendously so.
1440p at ultra settings is mostly a miss for the GTX 1660: some games can break 60fps, but most run closer to 45fps. Dropping the image quality can get the card back to 60fps, but it’s better to stick to 1080p. 4K ultra settings is basically out of the question; the 6GB of memory becomes an issue, with games running out of VRAM and being forced to swap data to system RAM.
The GTX 1660 takes over for Nvidia as the new ‘sweet spot’ for mainstream GPUS. That’s why the cards use
GDDR5 memory: supply and pricing on GDDR5X and GDDR6 apparently “wasn’t enough” to meet the expected demand. Plus there are a large chunk of PC gamers running far less capable hardware, so anyone with a GTX 960 or lower may finally be tempted to make the switch.
Or not, since there’s still only a minor bump in performance relative to the GTX 1060 6GB for only a slightly lower price. The big competition from our point of view is the open-source friendly AMD 8GB RX 580 that spars well in performance terms with the 1660, but can be picked up for £20-£70 less in many cases.