NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 6 GB GDDR5 Graphics Card Review Ft. MSI Gaming X ($249) and Ventus XS ($219) – The Best Turing Card For Budget Gamers?

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 and Turing TU116 GPU

While we have already detailed the Turing GPU architecture, it should be pointed out that the TU116 GPU, while it shares the same DNA as the Turing architecture has some big changes to what've seen on the GeForce RTX 20 series cards.

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Based on the 12th Generation Turing GPU architecture, the TU116 GPU found on the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and the GeForce GTX 1660 features the same shader innovations that were introduced on Turing but to balance it out in terms of power, cost and performance, a few adjustments had to be made. This is done through the exclusion of RT cores and Tensor cores on the GeForce GTX cards with Turing architecture. It is pointed out that the Turing architecture on GeForce GTX still delivers improved performance & better efficiency compared to its predecessor while supporting concurrent floating point and integer Ops.

So let's talk about the balanced architecture design of the Turing TU116 and how it still manages to improve upon its Pascal based predecessors. The first thing to mention is the three big changes in the Turing SM. The revamped structure of the Turing TU116 SM enables processing of FP32 & INT operations concurrently through the use of dedicated cores within the SM. The list of features that Turing TU116 GPU adds over Pascal GP106 include:

• Concurrent FP and INT operations
• Variable Rate Shading
• Unified Cache Architecture
• GDDR6 Memory Subsystem
• Dedicated FP16 Cores
• Turing NVENC Support

The Turing SM can also perform FP16 operations at double the rate of FP32. The Turing TU116 GPU is rated at 11 TOPs (FP+INT), 11 TFLOPs FP16 and an improved bandwidth that is resultant of the higher cache size of 1.5 MB compared to just 480 KB on the Pascal GP106 GPU.

If we look at some modern gaming titles, then we can see that developers are widely mixing floating point operations with integer instructions. For every 100 instructions in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, for example, 62 are floating point and 38 integers, on average. In previous GPUs, the floating point math datapath in the SM would sit idly whenever one of these non-FP-math runs.

Turing adds a second parallel Integer execution unit never to ever CUDA core that executes these instructions in parallel with floating point math. This would allow the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660 graphics card to deliver a 1.5x performance improvement over the GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB & 3 GB models in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

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Now coming to the raw specifications of the GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card. The TU116 GPU is fabricated on the TSMC's 12nm FFN (FinFET NVIDIA) process node. It features 3 GPCs, 12 TPCs, and 22 Turing SMs. Each SM contains 64 cores which equal to a total of 1408 CUDA Cores. There's also 88 Texture Units and 48 Raster Operation Units on the card. The base clock is maintained at 1530 MHz while the boost clock is maintained at 1785 MHz. You can tell from the specifications that the GTX 1660 has a slightly cut down TU116 SKU compared to the GTX 1660 Ti.

The card would feature 6 GB of GDDR5 VRAM running along a 192-bit bus interface. The memory system would be clocked at 8.0 Gbps delivering an effective bandwidth of 192 GB/s. The card is rated at 157.1 GigaTexel/s, 5.0 TFLOPs FP32 and 10 TFLOPs FP16 compute power. The card features a single 8 pin connector to boot and has the same TDP of 120W. Display outputs include a single DisplayPort, a single DVI-D, and an HDMI connector.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX/GTX "Turing" Family:

Graphics Card Name	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 D6	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
GPU Architecture	Turing GPU (TU117)	Turing GPU (TU117)	Turing GPU (TU116)	Turing GPU (TU116)	Turing GPU (TU116)	Turing GPU (TU116)	Turing GPU (TU106)	Turing GPU (TU106)	Turing GPU (TU104)	Turing GPU (TU102)
Process	12nm FNN	12nm FNN	12nm FNN	12nm FNN	12nm FNN	12nm FNN	12nm FNN	12nm FNN	12nm FNN	12nm FNN
Die Size	200mm2	200mm2	284mm2	284mm2	284mm2	284mm2	445mm2	445mm2	545mm2	754mm2
Transistors	4.7 Billion	4.7 Billion	6.6 Billion	6.6 Billion	6.6 Billion	6.6 Billion	10.6 Billion	10.6 Billion	13.6 Billion	18.6 Billion
CUDA Cores	896 Cores	896 Cores	1280 Cores	1408 Cores	1408 Cores	1536 Cores	1920 Cores	2304 Cores	2944 Cores	4352 Cores
TMUs/ROPs	56/32	56/32	80/32	88/48	88/48	96/48	120/48	144/64	192/64	288/96
GigaRays	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	5 Giga Rays/s	6 Giga Rays/s	8 Giga Rays/s	10 Giga Rays/s
Cache	1.5 MB L2 Cache	1.5 MB L2 Cache	1.5 MB L2 Cache	1.5 MB L2 Cache	1.5 MB L2 Cache	1.5 MB L2 Cache	4 MB L2 Cache	4 MB L2 Cache	4 MB L2 Cache	6 MB L2 Cache
Base Clock	1485 MHz	1410 MHz	1530 MHz	1530 MHz	1530 MHz	1500 MHz	1365 MHz	1410 MHz	1515 MHz	1350 MHz
Boost Clock	1665 MHz	1590 MHz	1725 MHz	1785 MHz	1785 MHz	1770 MHz	1680 MHz	1620 MHz 1710 MHz OC	1710 MHz 1800 MHz OC	1545 MHz 1635 MHz OC
Compute	3.0 TFLOPs	3.0 TFLOPs	4.4 TFLOPs	5.0 TFLOPs	5.0 TFLOPs	5.5 TFLOPs	6.5 TFLOPs	7.5 TFLOPs	10.1 TFLOPs	13.4 TFLOPs
Memory	Up To 4 GB GDDR5	Up To 4 GB GDDR6	Up To 4 GB GDDR6	Up To 6 GB GDDR5	Up To 6 GB GDDR6	Up To 6 GB GDDR6	Up To 6 GB GDDR6	Up To 8 GB GDDR6	Up To 8 GB GDDR6	Up To 11 GB GDDR6
Memory Speed	8.00 Gbps	12.00 Gbps	12.00 Gbps	8.00 Gbps	14.00 Gbps	12.00 Gbps	14.00 Gbps	14.00 Gbps	14.00 Gbps	14.00 Gbps
Memory Interface	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	192-bit	192-bit	192-bit	192-bit	256-bit	256-bit	352-bit
Memory Bandwidth	128 GB/s	192 GB/s	192 GB/s	192 GB/s	336 GB/s	288 GB/s	336 GB/s	448 GB/s	448 GB/s	616 GB/s
Power Connectors	N/A	N/A	6 Pin	8 Pin	8 Pin	8 Pin	8 Pin	8 Pin	8+8 Pin	8+8 Pin
TDP	75W	75W	100W	120W	125W	120W	160W	185W (Founders) 175W (Reference)	225W (Founders) 215W (Reference)	260W (Founders) 250W (Reference)
Starting Price	$149 US	$149 US	$159 US	$219 US	$229 US	$279 US	$349 US	$499 US	$699 US	$999 US
Price (Founders Edition)	$149 US	$149 US	$159 US	$219 US	$229 US	$279 US	$349 US	$599 US	$799 US	$1,199 US
Launch	April 2019	April 2020	November 2019	March 2019	October 2019	February 2019	January 2019	October 2018	September 2018	September 2018

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9.9

WCCFTECH RATING

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 is the graphics card to get if you are on a budget, it has the best value in its price range and can play all the latest AAA titles on 1080p resolution at respectable features with a strong suit of Turing shading features backing it up while delivering NVIDIA's world-class power GPU efficiency.

Pros

• Turing's Performance and Efficiency at under $250 US
• Many Custom Models Available at MSRP ($219)
• Faster Than The GTX 1060 6 GB and Radeon RX 580 8 GB
• Good upgrade from GTX 960 and GTX 1060 3 GB
• Great performance for 1080p Gaming Titles
• Great performance for eSports Gaming Titles
• Great thermals on both custom cards
• Good Noise levels on both custom cards
• Power efficiency has increased drastically
• Support NVIDIA Adaptive Shading Technology
• Good driver support for GeForce products, compatibility with DX11, DX12, Vulkan, OpenGL titles
• Good Display Connectivity, support for VESA Adaptive-Sync and G-Sync Compatible Monitors

Cons

• No RT Cores For Ray Tracing Support
• No Tensor Cores For DLSS Support

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