Dawn of the GeForce 1660 Ti

With the GeForce GTX 1660 series arriving, we’re aiming to build a 1080p gaming powerhouse for $1,500...

AH, THE LONG-AWAITED arrival of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. We’ve been waiting for this for a while, and it’s great to see it finally here. A mainstream GPU that strikes the perfect balance between price and power, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is Nvidia’s new mid-range graphics card, capable of delivering top-notch 1080p gaming while wisely dropping superfluities such as ray-tracing support to keep the cost at a very affordable level. And now that it’s arrived, we’re itching to get it into a new build.

We’re going with the slightly pricier MSI Gaming X GTX 1660 Ti for this build, netting us better performance – but the regular 1660 will work just fine, too, if you’re trying to make small savings. The mission was simple: Assemble a fierce 1080p gaming machine for a thousand dollars. Pushing it to higher resolutions isn’t important here; frame rate and general performance are the name of the game. Because of this, we were able to go for slightly more conservative pickings for the processor, motherboard, and RAM – as is often the case, the GPU is the champion of this build.

And what a champion it is. The 1660 checks in at a comparable price to the older, slower GTX 1060, while this Ti variant is faster, and handles overclocking well. It might sit below the RTX models in speed, but with 6GB of memory and trimmed fat in other areas, too, it’s excellent bang for your buck. Keeping the price down proved tricky when taking storage into consideration, but eventually we had a list of ingredients, and only slightly over budget. The only thing left was to, as the title goes, build it.