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
Comments Locked

77 Comments

View All Comments

  • Qasar - Sunday, March 17, 2019 - link

    ebay is not really an answer, as some.. may not want to deal with the hassle of ebay, or even have an ebay account. and now a days, not all games can be resold. but that still doesnt add any " value " to the video card by adding specific games...
  • romrunning - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link

    Triple-slot coolers pretty much kill it for mini-ITX systems. Usually they only have room for double-slot at most.
  • damianrobertjones - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link

    Second hand 1070 all... day... long.
  • TheCurve - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link

    Great review guys, loved it!
  • Tilmitt - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link

    If you actually want these reviews to be useful to real people making actual upgrade decisions, you need to include far more older GPUs. All the mid and high end GPUs from the 700 and 900 series at least. Preferably an awful lot more than this.
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link

    It's always a fine balance between including older cards for context, and newer cards to showcase how it actually compares to other things you can buy (and the product it directly replaces). In this case we do have the GTX 960 and the R9 390 in these graphs; meanwhile for everything else, Bench can give you whatever comparisons you're looking for.

    https://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU18/2293
  • Tilmitt - Friday, March 15, 2019 - link

    Unless I'm doing it wrong, bench is useless because the cards people want to compare are
    segregated into different bench years so you can't actually compare them. How does one compare a 770 and a 1660?
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, March 15, 2019 - link

    Fair enough point on the Kepler cards. We haven't gone in and backfilled those yet. However all of the 900 series cards are in there.
  • Hrel - Tuesday, March 19, 2019 - link

    Doesn't seem to be any way to compare the R9 280x to the 1660 either, or the GTX1070.
  • zeroidea - Monday, March 18, 2019 - link

    If all the benchmark data is in a database, might it be possible to make the charts dynamic, and have an "add card to this graph" option? Better yet, store a user's personal system (or import it from pcpartpicker) and do this automatically for logged-in users, since this is what a lot of people care about (and currently open multiple tabs to different websites in order to accomplish the same thing). That's the kind of value-add that'd get me to cough up a bit for a premium membership, if AT ever wanted to go down that route.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now