The Nvidia GTX 1660 has been announced and the cards are now available. There is no reference design model, so you will need to get custom cards but it can be overclocked to get the same performance of the stock Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti. This is very interesting indeed. In doing so you not only get more performance for the money that you are spending but you also get to save some money.
The Nvidia GTX 1660 is already 15% faster than the 6 GB GTX 1060 and 30% faster than the 6GB model but overclocking the card can get you even better performance for the price. Overclocking is much easier and safer than it used to be and mildly overclocking your graphics card should not be an issue.
Nvidia GTX 1660 Overclocking Benchmarks
You can check out the benchmarks below in order to see how well the Nvidia GTX 1660 can overclock and how close it can come to the stock performance of the Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti:
Apex Legends
The RTX 2060 is on top which is no surprise and the GTX 1660 Ti is faster than the non-Ti model but you can see that with a bit of an overclock the performance gap is minimized. The Nvidia GTX 1660 Overclock provides better performance compared to the Ti model. You can see that there is a bit of headroom for overclocking here which is great for people that need that extra performance out of the box.
We see a similar case when you turn the resolution up to 1440p The Nvidia GTX 1660 overclock is able to beat the more expensive Ti model even at the higher resolution and is able to run the game at 60 FPS on average.
Far Cry 5
When we look at Far Cry 5, the Nvidia GTX 1660 overclock get very close to the performance of the Ti model. The performance is already better than the GTX 1060 and with the overclock you get a few additional FPS.
The same is the case at 1440p. The result are within the margin of error but the performance of the Nvidia GTX 1660 overclock is similar to the GTX 1660 Ti and much better than the GTX 1060.
GTAV
Yet again the numbers are within the margin of error and the performance of the Nvidia GTX 1660 overclock is similar to the Ti model. You can see that by spending less money and spending around 20 minutes on manual overclocking you can get the performance of the more expensive version.
Similar results can be seen if you turn the resolution up to 1440p. FPS reduced across the board but the performance of the Nvidia GTX 1660 overclock remains similar to the Ti model.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a pretty intensive game and you can see how well these graphics cards perform in the benchmarks below:
You can see that the performance of the overclocked GTX 1660 is identical to the GTX 1660 Ti.
Turning up the resolution gives us similar results and you can turn down the settings a bit in order to hit 60 FPS.
Remember that while you can get similar performance to the GTX 1660 Ti by overclocking the GTX 1660, if you do get the Ti model, overclocking it will give you even better performance.
AMD has released the AMD RX 560 XT for the entry-level market which comes with double the cores. This is exclusive to the Asian market and will not be coming to Europe or America. Former AMD graphics boss Raja Koduri also talked about why he left the company and joined Intel.
Let us know what you think about these graphics cards and which one you would rather get for yourself.