The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Review, Feat. EVGA XC GAMING: Turing Stakes Its Claim at $219
by Ryan Smith & Nate Oh on March 14, 2019 9:01 AM ESTPower, Temperature, and Noise
As always, we'll take a look at power, temperature, and noise of the GTX 1660, though after having seen the GTX 1660 Ti in a similar if not identical design, we aren't expecting anything out of the ordinary. As mentioned earlier, we've seen the XC Black board with the GTX 1660 Ti not too long ago.
Using the same TU116 GPU as the GTX 1660 Ti, the voltages are unsurprisingly the same.
| NVIDIA GeForce Video Card Voltages | ||
| Model | Boost | Idle |
| GeForce GTX 1660 | 1.037V | 0.656V |
| GeForce GTX 1660 Ti | 1.037V | 0.656V |
| GeForce RTX 2060 | 1.025v | 0.725v |
| GeForce GTX 1060 6GB | 1.043v | 0.625v |
As for clockspeeds, the same broad points from the GTX 1660 Ti review apply. Clocks at +10W TDP and at reference 120W TDP are only slightly altered, and the trend of NVIDIA's conservative boost estimates continues.
| GeForce Video Card Average Clockspeeds | |||||
| Game | GTX 1660 | EVGA GTX 1660 XC |
GTX 1660 Ti | GTX 1060 6GB | |
| Max Boost Clock |
2160MHz
|
2160MHz |
2160MHz
|
1898MHz
|
|
| Boost Clock | 1830MHz | 1830MHz | 1770MHz | 1708MHz | |
| Battlefield 1 | 1880MHz | 1885MHz | 1888MHz | 1855MHz | |
| Far Cry 5 | 1889MHz | 1897MHz | 1903MHz | 1855MHz | |
| Ashes: Escalation | 1874MHz | 1872MHz | 1871MHz | 1837MHz | |
| Wolfenstein II | 1832MHz | 1861MHz | 1825MHz | 1835MHz | |
| Final Fantasy XV | 1865MHz | 1869MHz | 1855MHz | 1850MHz | |
| GTA V | 1894MHz | 1898MHz | 1901MHz | 1872MHz | |
| Shadow of War | 1879MHz | 1882MHz | 1860MHz | 1861MHz | |
| F1 2018 | 1880MHz | 1886MHz | 1877MHz | 1865MHz | |
| Total War: Warhammer II | 1890MHz | 1893MHz | 1908MHz | 1875MHz | |
Compared to the official average boost clock of the GTX 1660 Ti, the differences are also minor.
Power Consumption
Meanwhile when it comes to idle power consumption, the GTX 1660 falls in line with everything else at 83W. With contemporary desktop cards, idle power has reached the point where nothing short of low-level testing can expose what these cards are drawing.
All told, NVIDIA has very good and very consistent power control here. and it remains one of their key advantages over AMD, and key strengths in keeping their OEM customers happy.
Temperature
Noise
Turning again to EVGA's card, despite being a custom open air design, the GTX 1660 XC Black doesn't come with 0db idle capabilties and features a single smaller but higher-RPM fan. The default fan curve puts the minimum at 33%, which is indicative that EVGA has tuned the card for cooling over acoustics. But the curve is a little more forgiving at higher temperatures, and doesn't ramp up as much, reducing their noise levels significantly from the Ti XC Black.
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Qasar - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
it also depends on if the consoles even have any games some one would want to play... for me.. those games are not on consoles.. they are on a comp... not worth it for me to by a console as it would just sit under my tv unused..D. Lister - Saturday, March 16, 2019 - link
@eva02langley: "...console hardware is more efficient since it is dedicated for gaming only."smh... console hardware used to be more efficient for gaming when console hardware was composed of custom parts. Now, consoles use essentially the same parts as PCs, so that argument doesn't work anymore.
Fact of the matter is, consoles remain competitive in framerate by either cutting down on internal resolution, or graphic quality features, like AA, AF, AO, or in many cases, both res and features. Take a look at the face-offs conducted by the Digital Foundry over at Eurogamers.net.
D. Lister - Saturday, March 16, 2019 - link
@eva02langley: I also find it rather ironic that you, who has often criticized NVidia for not being open-sourced enough with their technologies, are making a case here for consoles that are completely proprietary and closed-off systems.maroon1 - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
Faster, consume much less power, smaller and produce less noise than RX590 which cost sameEven if you ignore the performance advantage, the GTX 1660 is still better out of the two. No reason to buy big power hungry GPU when it has no performance advantage
0ldman79 - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
What is it with Wolfenstein that kills the 900 series?I mean they're still competitive in almost everything else, but Wolfenstein just buries the 900 series horribly. If it's that bad I'm glad I'm not addicted to that series. I had thought about picking up a copy, but damn...
Opencg - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
they may be using some async techniques. the famous example is doom where many 900 series saw worse performance on vulkan due to async being a cpu based driver side implementation.Dribble - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
I think it's because it has FP16 code in the shaders - which Turing and newer AMD have hardware support for, but Pascal doesn't. It was AMD's trump card until Turing so you'll find a few AMD sponsored games use FP16.Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
"What is it with Wolfenstein that kills the 900 series?"Memory capacity. It really wants more than 4GB when all of its IQ settings are cranked up, which leaves everything below the GTX 980 Ti a bit short on space.
AustinPowersISU - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
Used GTX 1070 still makes the most sense. You can easily get one for less than this card and have much better performance.Nvidia needs to do better.
eva02langley - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
It is still their best offering in term of price/performance from Turing. However, yeah, that should have been done way before.