Today, we’ll be taking a quick look at the MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti ARMOR OC (6GB GDDR6) Graphics Card. This card uses the latest GPU from Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti featuring Nvidia’s Turing architecture (used on their RTX series) and 1536 CUDA Cores, but lacks the essential Tenor and RT cores for ray-tracing. It comes with 6GB GDDR6 ram running at a memory of 12 Gbps on a 192-bit memory bus.
With so much hype surrounding Nvidia’s recent launch of their RTX series of graphics card, it was quite a surprise when Nvidia announce the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. So why did they do it? Well, Nvidia’s RTX based graphics cards are pretty expensive to say the least, and higher-end models are often out of reach for many users. In other words, no one is buying them! … Unless you have lots of spare cash. This in tern will affect sales and decrease revenue for Nvidia.
To combat this, Nvidia have decided to replace the already EOL (end of life) Geforce GTX 1060, which has been one of their greatest money earner. So with this in mind, Nvidia jump at the chance to fill the empty space left behind from GTX 1060. Now say hello to their newest kid on the block … the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti.
We already seen what Nvidia’s RTX series can do, so it will be interesting to see how the GTX 1660 Ti will perform in terms of performance. Some reports have already championed its killer performance … easily matching the GTX 1070, and almost on par with the GTX 1070 Ti or even the GTX 1080.
Here’s a quick comparison between the GeForce RTX 20 series and the GTX 1660 Ti (default clock speeds)…
| GeForce RTX 2080 | GeForce RTX 2070 | GeForce RTX 2060 | GeForce GTX 1660 Ti | GeForce GTX 1060 | |
| Architecture | Turing | Turing | Turing | Turing | Pascal |
| CUDA Cores | 2944 | 2304 | 1920 | 1536 | 1280 |
| Frame Buffer | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 6GB GDDR6 | 6GB GDDR6 | 6GB GDDR5 |
| Base Clock Speed | 1515 MHz |
1410 MHz | 1365 MHz |
1500 MHz | 1506 MHz |
| Boost Clock Speed | 1710 MHz | 1620 MHz | 1680 MHz | 1770+ MHz | 1708 MHz |
| Giga Rays/s | 8 | 6 | 5 | N/A | N/A |
| Memory Speed | 14Gbps | 14 Gbps | 14 Gbps | 12 Gbps | 8 Gbps |
| Memory Bus | 256-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit | 192-bit | 192-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 448 Gb/s | 448 Gb/s | 336 Gb/s | 288 Gb/s | 192 Gb/s |
| Power | 215W | 175W | 160W | 130W | 120W |
| DX12 Support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Vulkan API | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Ray Tracing | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
We’ll start by saying thanks to Hornington Computers for supplying the review sample. For those who don’t know who MSI is, here’s a little blurb taken from their website …
As a world leading gaming brand, MSI is the most trusted name in gaming and eSports. We’ve dedicated countless hours and committed numerous resources to the eSports community to support the world’s most aspiring and best gamers and use their knowledge and expertise in our products in return. MSI integrated all gamers’ aspirational functions in its gaming rigs, eliminating the tedious trial and error by themselves and pushing the performance beyond limits. The determination to surpass past achievements has made MSI a ‘True Gaming’ brand with gaming spirit throughout the industry!
Dedicated to gamer-driven innovation, MSI leverages its remarkable R&D strengths to craft top-notch, well-acclaimed notebook PCs, graphics cards, motherboards, and desktop PCs. Now, MSI GAMING Series receives gamers’ unanimous acclaim and the Pro Series has an excellent reputation for quality and durability. All these distinctive products have made MSI a forerunner in the high-end market. Also adding to the lineup are cloud servers, tailor-made IPCs, intelligent robotic appliances and human-centric vehicle electronics that further demonstrate MSI’s strengths and endeavors in artificial intelligence, commercial and IOT(Internet of Things) markets.
With the lack of RT cores essential for ray-tracing, will users really care? … I think not. The availability of games that can currently run ray-tracing is far and few. We may see more titles this year, but right now I think most users just want an affordable graphics card that run most games without paying an arm and a leg for features that they won’t use … just yet.
OK, enough with the talk … let’s see how this card will perform against some of the graphics card we’ve already tested. It should beat the GTX 1060 with ease and compare very well against the GTX 1070.
You can buy something similar – the MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
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