 Okay, so humor me for a minute here. My son's in grade one now, and one of the things they're doing in his class is pattern recognition. So he brings home his homework, and he'll have a problem that looks a little something like this. Now if he wrote 1660 Ti as the answer to that question, I'd probably say something like, Why don't you think about it some more and then try again? And yet somehow he'd be right! So What in the Sam fool is a GTX 1660 Ti and oh, I don't know. I mean who cares what they call it if the product is good, right? So let's see if it is. But first, Speaking of good products, our sponsor, the OnePlus 6T features top-of-the-line specs and OnePlus's optimized oxygen OS for a fast smooth experience. You can now win one of two in our giveaway at the link below. Right off the bat, some of you eagle-eyed viewers probably noticed that this is not a Founders edition, and there's a good reason for that. There isn't one. Nvidia left this launch entirely up to its board partners, and that means that we are going to see a pretty wide variety of designs. ASUS alone has four, but contrary to the EEC filings that were spotted prior to the launch, the core specs of all of them are going to be the same. So there's no weird variations with cut down memory to confuse people. For now. Not that there won't be any confusion. What the actual f*** is up with the name of this thing? 1660 Ti. The best guess that we came up with is that it has 16 FP16 and 16 FP32 cores. But then when we asked Nvidia, their official response after playing Koi and pretending not to know that it wasn't perfectly normal, was that they chose it to differentiate it from the RTX 2060. Which is almost as stupid as the way that they then giggled about it like school children, because there was a real reason that they couldn't tell us hee hee hee. So TLDR for those interested is that it is some kind of inside joke, and knowing those guys, it's probably a dirty one. Kind of like how GeForce experience obviously shortens to GF or girlfriend experience, a more premium prostitution service where she pretends to be genuinely interested in you instead of just having quick sex and leaving. So cool, I guess. Why don't we move on? Specs wise, at the 1660s heart is the more sensibly named TU116 GPU, which Nvidia claims is not simply a TU106 with some features cut out, but rather a brand new GPU engineered from the ground up without the machine learning tensor or real-time ray tracing RT cores from the RTX series. It's got 20% fewer CUDA cores than the RTX 2060, so on the surface it looks like it'll be much slower even in conventional games without RTX on. But thankfully, just like we saw with the Radeon 7 compared to Vega 64, we are also treated to a hefty core clock increase, which should help make up some ground, especially considering that we will still get all of the other Turing goodies. Cache improvements, variable rate shader rendering, concurrent floating point, and integer processing, and perhaps most importantly for the entry-level game streamers out there, that new Turing Nvenc engine that provides image quality comparable to CPU driven x264. Mmm, that crispy gameplay footage. Now, we're only going to use one test bench today to keep things a little simpler than our Radeon 7 review, but it should give you a good idea of where this card falls. And, the gaming results look very promising. At 1080p, we are seeing equivalent or better performance than the GTX 1070 across the board, and titles that are designed with simultaneous floating point and integer math in mind, like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, see a pretty big performance boost. It's especially important to consider here that the GTX 1070 has 384 more CUDA cores than the new 1660 Ti. That's impressive. And, these results even carried over to our 1440p testing, where we got playable, if less consistent, frame rates on this very mid-range card. This is the generational improvement that we had been looking for in Turing up until now. It's just taken Nvidia this long to strip out some of those cost-adding features that many gamers don't want to pay more for right now. When we move on to productivity though, the GTX 1660 Ti falters somewhat. Now, it does at least keep up with the 1070 that it's looking to usurp in most tasks, with longer blender renders being a particularly strong point, but in other tests like Luxmark and most of Specview Perf, we're looking at significantly less consistency. It does come out ahead sometimes, but then also significantly behind in other times. In fairness though, I guess we should expect this from a card that has fewer CUDA cores, but then executes combined math instructions more efficiently with a more efficient cache setup. As for thermals, well, this high-end board design from Asus represents a best-case scenario with a seriously overbuilt cooler, so I won't spend too much time talking about it, but what we can glean a bit of information from is the power draw. This card draws nearly 10 watts less power on the 12 volt connector than the RTX 2060 and even less than the GTX 1070, which if you'll recall, it meets or exceeds in terms of performance. Not a bad result, and it gets even better. Even our pre-factory overclocked card had some headroom for overclocking with OC scanner, and with more direct tuning, it could probably go a little further Silicon lottery willing. So then, let's answer the big question here. Was Nvidia right to be truly teed off with me when I concluded my RTX 2060 review by recommending that our viewers simply wait for this card, which at that time was a mere rumor that Did they deny it? No, they just refused to comment on it. Well, even ignoring the missing features that define the RTX cards from a price-to-performance standpoint, things are actually a little blurry here. So our top-of-the-line Asus card here costs $329. That is just 20 bucks cheaper than a reference RTX 2060. Honestly, that makes the ray tracing and tensor core equipped version the obvious choice in every scenario. So as usual, the premium versions of mainstream products don't make a ton of sense. But when we drop down to the reference model at $279, which should perform pretty much the same, the GTX 1660's value proposition becomes a little more clear. It outpaces AMD's RX 590 at a similar price and it outpaces the GTX 1070, which launched at a hundred dollars more and currently sells for $300. So for folks looking for an upgrade from a 9 or a lower-end 10 series card, hey, a card that costs less than $300 for that kind of performance is an excellent value proposition. The only problem is that if you're ponying up for a whole new system rather than upgrading by our numbers, it's basically a no-brainer to spend the extra $70 on an RTX 2060. We're actually planning a full video where we talk about this particular value calculation sometime in the future. In conclusion though, well played Nvidia. You guys managed to deliver just the right amount of value to edge out the competition and no more. You truly are Team Green. 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