We don't need no stinkin' ray tracing.
Nvidia has finally done it; released a Turing GPU without ray tracing and DLSS, and it's aimed directly at the mainstream with an MSRP of $279. Asus sent us its flagship ROG Strix model, which has all the trimmings as well as a $50 premium, making it a $329 GPU. It's based on an all-new chip not used in previous GPUs, for obvious reasons, and it's targeting 1080p gamers with vintage GPUs looking to upgrade. There will not be a Founder's Edition card, as this time around it's just partner cards, and surprise – it should be available to purchase as you are reading this.
With the GTX 1660 Ti Nvidia is targeting folks on a budget with older GPUs, such as those rocking Maxwell or Kepler GPUs. However, compared to the previous gen's Pascal-based GTX 1060 Nvidia is promising 1.5x performance with the GTX 1660 Ti. Compared to that GPU this one has the same TDP but with two billion more transistors, a larger die, twenty percent more CUDA cores, and fifty percent more memory bandwidth thanks to faster 12Gb/s memory. Basically it has more of everything, except higher power consumption since it's fab'd on a smaller node.
Asus is going to come out with a whole slew of GTX 1660 Ti boards (seven total), and this is the top dog - its ROG Strix OC version. Every other version will be lower clocked, have fewer fans, or both. The base model is $279 and there will be everything in between including a dual-fan model for $304, so you'll have plenty of options. I'm sure the same will be true of other partners like Gigabyte, EVGA and the rest. Since this GPU is targeted at the majority of gamers, it will come in every size, design, and price imaginable. If you're looking to upgrade you will have a ton of options, that is for sure.
What separates the ROG Strix version from the other Asus models (and from other GPUs in general) are a few things. The first is what Asus calls Auto Extreme Technology, which simply means parts of the GPU are built with automated technology, so there's less chance for mistakes in the manufacturing process, enhancing reliability. The second is called MaxContact Technology, and it's how the heat spreader is designed. Essentially Asus has designed a smoother plate with less pits that it claims allows for "2x more contact" with the GPU die, resulting in a cooler GPU.
Finally, this is the only model with Asus FanConnect II, which is two four-pin fan headers on the PCB that allow the GPU's temperature to control the speed of attached case fans. This model also has RGB lights, aka "Aura" so if you have an Asus motherboard you can sync the lighting between them. This GPU also has a metal frame to reduce the possibility of GPU droop.
The card itself is quite large and feels over-engineered for a midrange GPU. It takes up 2.5 PCIe slots and is 11.9" long, and two inches thick. The custom PCB has a metal backplate with an interesting design, and outputs include two HDMI 2.0b and two DisplayPort 1.4.
There's RGB lighting of course, and it's the type where several areas around the GPU glow when it's in effect. It's one of the better implementations, but I do like some sort of side badge lighting, which this one doesn't have. In fact, the lighting and design of the card is pretty much the same as the previous generation GPUs from Asus. It looks good, no question, but is also kind of starting to show its age a bit. Asus also includes a hardware button on the top of the card (when it's installed) that lets you turn off the lighting with a tap.
The GPU runs on one eight-pin power connector, and it has a TDP of 120w, so as you can see the cooling apparatus is total overkill. Asus recommends a mere 450w PSU for this GPU, so it can run on pretty much any machine.
Asus includes two utilities with this GPU; Aura for controlling the lighting, and GPU Tweak II for monitoring and adjusting the card's clock and fan speeds. Both programs are difficult to use, and feel like beta software. This level of hardware certainly deserves better software. It's also annoying that they can't integrate both of these types of functionalities into one app.
GPU Tweak offers one-click overclocking, which sounds cool, but the GPU overclocks all by itself, and is whisper quiet all the time, so there's not really any need to bounce back and forth between modes. You can enable an additional real-time monitoring graph for everything from clock and fan speed to VRAM usage. The Simple Mode (below) tells you the general basics of the card and its current status. There's an Advanced Mode that lets you make changes to all the typical settings such as Boost Clock, Power Target, and so forth. It works fine but the UI isn't friendly.
The Aura application I received for this review wouldn't work with the card, and we couldn't resolve it. However, it's exactly the same app that's appeared on previous Asus GPUs, and it's very basic but works fine. Here's a screenshot from the press kit Asus sent over (below). The version they sent me was beta since the card wasn't released yet, but I'm sure the standard version that's available now should work once cards are shipping.
To test the ROG Strix GTX 1660 Ti I dropped it into the IGN test bench, which features an Intel Core i7-7700K Skylake CPU, 16GB of DDR4 memory, an Asus Z270 Prime motherboard, Intel SSD, and an EVGA PSU. I'm comparing it to all similarly priced GPUs, and just as we went to press AMD announced it was lowering the price on the RX Vega 56 to $279 on Newegg with a three game bundle (so it can compete with this card's launch). Sadly by the time the email hit my inbox, the card was out of stock. The remaining supply of Vega 56 GPUs were not priced at $279, so I have no idea what is going on with this sudden price reduction. With that said, here's the benchmarks. I tested at 2560 x 1440 and 1920 x 1080 since that is what this GPU is designed to do. If you want to run 4K you're going to need a beefier GPU.
Since this is an all-new GPU I wasn't really sure where it would land on the performance map, but it's surprisingly close to the $349 RTX 2060 in a lot of games. That's not too surprising since this particular GPU is overclocked and only $20 less expensive, however. Just like that GPU, the GTX 1660 Ti falls pretty close to the GTX 1070/1070 Ti. We only have an overclocked 1070 Ti on-hand, so it's on the extreme high end of what that card can do, but the 1660 Ti was able to get quite close in several titles.
Overall it's very, very close to the RTX 2060 in terms of performance, sans ray tracing and DLSS of course. AMD's Radeon RX 590 is a competitor to this GPU also, but unfortunately we've not reviewed that GPU, so I included numbers for its predecessor, the RX 580. As you can see there's really no competition between them, and the only times the scores were close was at 1080p where there's some CPU bottlenecking happening. The Radeon Vega 56 puts up a very good fight with this GPU as well. If it really is $279 now, with a three game bundle, it is a very strong competitor, unless you weigh power consumption heavily.
It should be noted this particular model runs so quiet I couldn't even tell it was on, even during gaming and full-load operation. Even if I put my ear next to it and removed the case door I couldn't hear anything beyond ambient fan noises. It is really whisper quiet, and even has the "0db fan" technology where the fans don't spin unless it's under load. But even then, you can't hear them. It ran at 58C under full load, which is quite chilly for a modern GPU, proving my claim from earlier that the cooler is overkill for this GPU. Still, if you like your GPUs chilly and quiet (and who doesn't?), this GPU delivers.
Previous Turing GPUs were excellent overclockers, and this one is no exception. In fact, it went beyond what we've been able to achieve on previous GPUs, and temperatures barely moved at the same time. I loaded up Heaven 4.0 to put a load on the GPU, and eventually the ROG Strix settled on a Boost Clock of 1950Mhz all on its own.
I then began nudging the Boost Clock up by small increments until the application locked, or I saw artifacts. When the smoke cleared I had a sizable overclock of 2.1GHz. Also note the GPU temperature in the screenshot below. It's pretty damn impressive.
Asus also includes an OC Scanner if you don't want to hassle with the manual approach. I ran it once and it was a little conservative but landed on 2025MHz. That's still pretty good and I think Asus overbuilt this GPU's cooler, as the result is the best overclock we've seen so far from a Turing GPU. Also if you're curious, I ran some of the benchmarks again with it overclocked and saw the typical three to five percent uplift.
The Asus ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1660 Ti OC has an MSRP of $329.99, but it won't be available for about a week according to Asus. Below you can find links to the other Asus GTX 1660 Ti cards though, if you're the impatient type.
It's hard to say if the ROG Strix version performs a lot better than the MSRP version, but it is definitely a great GPU. It runs totally silent, overclocks to the moon, and at $329 it's not too far off in performance from the more expensive RTX 2060/GTX 1070 Ti. I'm not knocking it much for its wonky software since it's optional, but Asus needs to step it up in this area. Its hardware though, as always, is some of the best there is, and this model in particular performed very well.
The ROG Strix GTX 1660 Ti is easily one of the best midrange GPUs there is right now.