At $219, Nvidia’s GTX 1660 makes midrange graphics cards affordable

By Arif Bacchus Published March 14, 2019

Image used with permission by copyright holder

After several months of rumors and leaks, Nvidia has officially announced its GTX 1660 graphics card. A competitor of AMD’s RX 590 graphics card, this latest Turing-powered GPU from Nvidia starts at $219 and aims to bring midrange performance to the desktops of gamers across the world.

Compared to the now 4-year-old GTX 960, the new GTX 1660 promises to deliver up to a 130 percent increase in performance in games, according to early product reviews. When pitted against the 6GB version of the last generation’s GTX 1060 GPU, it delivered up to a 15 percent performance boost. The new 1660 does not feature the ray-tracing and DLSS features found on board the more expensive RTX 2060 series graphics card. That’s likely due to the lack of the RT and Tensor cores — both of which were likely omitted to keep down the prices for gamers.

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On the technical side, the GTX 1660 features 1,408 CUDA cores, which is a slight downgrade from the 1,536 cores found on the inside of the GTX 1660 Ti. Elsewhere, it sports a boost clock rate of 1,785 MHz, which is an upgrade from the 1,770 MHZ rate on the GTX 1660. Ti.

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As for the standard memory configuration, the GTX 1660 features 6GB of GDDR5 memory, which is slightly slower than the GDDR6 memory found on board the GTX 1660 Ti. Power consumption is rated at 120 watts, so this means that gamers updating from a GTX 970 or GTX 960 to the GTX 1660 won’t need to swap out a power supply.

Nvidia is not currently selling a Founder Edition of the GTX 1660, so it will have to be purchased through partners. Gigabyte, MSI, ASUS, and EVGA already have custom versions of the GTX 1660 available for pre-order through the retailer Memory Express. Prices of these custom variants range from $320 to $360, depending on which manufacturer is chosen.

Just like the GTX 1660 Ti, The GTX 1660 was been one of Nvidia’s most leaked graphics cards, and in the days before today’s announcement, box art had shown up online. There are, however, still rumors indicating that Nvidia could also launch a GTX 1650 to put a cap on this GPU series. Either way, the Nvidia lineup is now more well-rounded for gamers on a tight budget.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Arif Bacchus is a native New Yorker and a fan of all things technology. Arif works as a freelance writer at Digital Trends…

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