The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Review, Feat. EVGA XC GAMING: Turing Stakes Its Claim at

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As NVIDIA’s carefully orchestrated rollout of its Turing family of GPUs and related video cards keeps steaming right along, we’re back again this month with the next piece in the GeForce product stack. Last month was, of course, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti; and if you know anything about NVIDIA naming then you know that NVIDIA never does a stand-alone Ti card. As a suffix indicating higher performance, if there’s a Ti card, then there needs to be a regular card as well. And today NVIDIA is delivering on just that with the vanilla GeForce GTX 1660.

For the Turing family launch, NVIDIA has been following a very straightforward top-to-bottom video card launch, and today’s GeForce GTX 1660 launch continues that pattern. With the GTX 1660 Ti coming in at the very top end of the mainstream market with a $279 price tag, NVIDIA is now ready to launch its lower-tier, more wallet-friendly $219 counterpart. This continues NVDIA’s cascade of Turing video cards down to lower prices and lower performance levels, raising the bar for video card performance at each price tier.

Turning our eyes to NVIDIA’s new card then, within the NVIDIA Turing GeForce product stack the GTX 1660 is essentially a cut-down GTX 1660 Ti, and serves as this generation’s version of the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB. Which is to say that it’s a card that uses the same GPU in a slightly cut-down configuration – in this case the same TU116 introduced for the GTX 1660 Ti – while instead making a larger tradeoff in memory in order to bring the price of the card down. Gone is GDDR6 in favor of cheaper, more widely available GDDR5, and better still you get a full 6GB of it.

Equally as important however, NVIDIA has (largely) stopped the naming shenanigans for this generation by not using memory capacity to indicate overall GPU performance. Though I’m still not a fan of suffixes (as they tend to get unintentionally cut off), this situation is massively better than the GTX 1060 naming system. So I will give credit to NVIDIA for not making the same consumer-unfriendly decision twice in a row.

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