Overall and Final Verdict
Well, the GTX 1660 Ti has been proven to be a good card a few times now and with this being the third card to come into the office I was mostly curious what Gigabyte was doing differently than anything else. After taking a look at the card and putting it through our testing I finally have a better idea of what they have going on. For starters, this is Gigabytes MSRP card, meaning they are aiming for the MSRP that Nvidia set for the GTX 1660 Ti, they have other models available as well but this is their cheapest. In this case, they did still release an overclocked card but a smaller overclock than what I saw on the MSI GTX 1660 Ti that I previously reviewed and that card was an MSRP card as well. The GTX 1660 Ti OC 6G has a boost clock of 1800 MHz which is 30 MHz over the stock clock and 30 under the MSI. It is also 60 MHz under EVGAs top end 1660 Ti as well. In my testing that ended up translating to a bigger performance difference that I expected but in the big picture it still was faster on average than the GTX 1070 and it ends up being a great 1080p card. The 6GB VRAM does run into some limitations at 1440p and you won’t be able to run everything at the highest detail at that resolution but there is some headroom over 1080p should you upgrade to that later.
Where Gigabyte really stood out though was with how quiet their Windforce design ran. Flipping one of the fans to cut down on turbulence between them really makes a difference when compared to the MSI which had two even larger fans. Cooling performance wasn’t bad, not on the level of the EVGA Ultra but better than what MSI put out. The main limitation with the cooling was the heatsink being orientated in a horizontal direction the fan shroud and fans seem to be designed to help push the air up and out. It was still a lot better than the tiny cast heatsink that MSI went with on their entry-level GTX 1660 Ti. Gigabyte kept costs lower by not having any RGB lighting at all, some people will find that to be a good thing and I’m sure others will want something flashy. I was disappointed in the loss of the DVI connection, I think at this price point some people will still need it. I also wasn’t a big fan of the backplate being plastic although I was happy there was a backplate when the much more expensive EVGA Ultra model didn’t come with one at all. The plastic backplate allowed Gigabyte to wrap the design around the end of the card which looks good, but I don’t like how much the plastic insulates the back of the PCB, holding a lot of that heat in.
Being Gigabytes MSRP card, the GTX 1660 Ti Ti OC comes in at $279.99 which is as cheap as you can get right now. Comparing it to the other 1660 Ti’s that I have tested I like what they did for cooling better than the MSI Ventus XS and it also isn’t significantly taller than a standard PCI height. But I do wish they would have competed a little better on the clock speed. Overall the better cooler would make this my choice over the Ventus XS. All of the other $279.99 cards are running at the stock clock speed. Going up in price to a mid-level GTX 1660 Ti is an option, but you quickly get to a price point where you might as well go with an RTX 2060 considering the free game those cards get you right now. So the base MSRP GTX 1660 Ti is the way to go and this is the only card with a quality cooler, backplate, and higher than stock clock speeds altogether.
Live Pricing: HERE
