Overclocking

Last, but not least, we'll take a look at overclocking. While NVIDIA does support overclocking, they have limited actual overvolting, and instead providing the ability to unlock 1-2 more boost bins and associated voltages. Either way, Maxwell 2 and Pascal certainly have much to thank for high clockspeeds; for Maxwell 2, it was a combination of high efficiency and ample overclocking headroom, while Pascal took advantage of the FinFET process to ramp up the clocks to new heights.

A total of four different overclocks were tested via EVGA's Precision X1; unfortunately, we were not able to get the auto OC scanning functionality to fully work. First was a baseline, consisting of 100% overvoltage and max temperature limits; power limit is already set to a soft cap of 130W at stock. The second was overclocking the GDDR5 memory by 1Gbps. The third was overclocking the GPU by +100MHz; in practice, observed clocks were in the mid 1900MHz. Lastly, all previous adjustments were combined for an overall overclock.

GeForce GTX 1660 Overclocking
  Baseline Memory OC GPU OC All OC
Core Clock 1530MHz 1530MHz 1530MHz 1530MHz
Boost Clock 1785MHz 1785MHz 1885MHz 1885MHz
Memory Clock 8Gbps 9Gbps (+250MHz) 8Gbps 9Gbps (+250MHz)

Naturally, these results cannot be taken as representative of all GTX 1660 cards, but results here can offer some insight.

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation - 2560x1440 - Extreme QualityGrand Theft Auto V - 2560x1440 - Very High QualityF1 2018 - 2560x1440 - Ultra QualityShadow of War - 2560x1440 - Ultra QualityWolfenstein II - 2560x1440 -

 

 

 

 

 

Power, Temperature, and Noise Final Words
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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 same

    Even 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.

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