We all know all the fuss aroud RTX series since NVIDIA launch it at September last year. No convinced comparison, no in-game demo, all we see at launch is “it just work” from Jenseng Huang himself. After 5 months of waiting and the only game support both Ray tracing and DLSS is Battlefield 5 (Metro: Exodus coming soon), but while Ray tracing has too much impact to performance, DLSS implementation introduce ton of image quality problem and doesn’t good enough for the performance improvement.
And let’s not forget about AMD side, despite just a refresh from RX 580 (refresh from RX 480), RX 590 still deliver excellent gaming performance at 1080p, out perform GTX 1060 with more affordable price than what NVIDIA call “affordable gaming GPU at 1080p” when they released RTX 2060. The pressure on NVIDIA side for taking back the lead in mid-tier range is heavy. After nearly 2 months of rumor, NVIDIA finally make a move by release GTX 1660Ti to compete with RX 590 from AMD. The problem is the price range, with a MSRP at 279$ and AIB like MSI Gaming X cost at 310$, some even higher like Strix from ASUS which put GTX 1060Ti purchase in a really odd position, it come really close to RTX 2060 MSRP (350$) or you can save another 50$-80$ and get AIB RTX 2060.
In this case, if you want to buy GTX 1660Ti at MSRP, you will have to live with a small version from AIB partner (no reference from NVIDIA), usually only have 1 fan with it. And premium versions like Gaming X cost nearly as the RTX 2060 which make many people wonder if this is worth the premium price or not?
But first, let’s take a look at the card itself. The Gaming of MSI is one of my favorite graphics card series on the market right now, but the colors was too much in my opinion. This time, I think MSI has finally nail it, by simplify the design, the Gaming series look refine more than ever.
As for the cooler, it may look like the same from the outside, but inside, MSI has improved lot of things. Especially the fan, with new design help improve airflow and noise level significantly, I can barely hear the fan spinning under full load.
Ok, enough with the rant, let’s talk about specs and performance. So far, the GTX 1660Ti look like a cut down version of RTX 2060 without fancy stuff like Ray tracing (RT cores) and DLSS (Tensor cores) and still have 6GB GDDR6 VRAM, 192-bit memory interface, slightly higher GPU clock. Unfortunately it only have 1536 CUDA cores, compare to 1920 CUDA cores of RTX 2060 but so the cost does. Fortunately, the MSI GTX 1660Ti Gaming X still perform very well at 1080p and 1440p, with 28% faster than GTX 1060 6GB, 22% faster than RX 590 and head to head with GTX 1070 in real world usage which is pretty impressive.
Now it clearly that GTX 1660Ti is the better choice for people who just want raw performance, but it only make sense if you can get it around MSRP (279$), anything above 300$ is coming closer to territory of RTX 2060 (350-400$) with more power horse than GTX 1660Ti. For my opinion, if you can live without a fancy graphics card, get a cheaper GTX 1660Ti of any manufacturer like MSI, GIGABYTE, ASUS, EVGA and may be overclock it, you will be suprise how far this little beast can go. But at the end of the day, it’s your money, go for whatever make you happy and enjoy it.
Here are more pictures of MSI GTX 1660Ti Gaming X:
