Gadgetory

so just like we did with the 1660 Ti launch we've got ourselves one of them custom fandangled special edition cards that come with all the bells and whistles and we've also got ourselves an MSRP card which is right here on the actual test bench so in terms of pricing there's obvious a little bit of a differential here we'll talk about that whether or not the extra horsepower features are worth it and then we're also going to talk about the extremely crowded product stack that has kind of been Nvidia as forte for the last several years EVGA offers a full range of components including video cards motherboards power supplies cases and peripherals regardless of your needs EVGA sure to have you covered to see what EVGA can do for your next build head to EVGA comm so the last time we took a look at a whole new family of graphics cards was obviously the Pascal and there was a card that was sort of slid in the mix there because of some competition that was taking place between AMD and NVIDIA especially with the Polaris cards their heights of popularity of the rx 480 and then the 575 80 and then the 590 which came out late last year the let's talk about the Nvidia stack so it basically went 1050 if you don't count the GT 1030 which a lot of people argue it's a gaming card you can game on that besides the point the GTX 1050 we had the 1050 Ti we had the 1063 gig the 1066 gig and then we had of course a 1070 1070 TI 1080 1080 Ti and then the Titan X and so we've kind of those other cards like the 1070 TI that slid in the stack because of the RX Vega or the Vega 56 and then you had the 1060 3G slid in there because of what the rx 560 and 570 were doing at that price point and so they made like the stopgap cards we're in the lower end from entry-level to mid range you kind of had a card like every 50 dollars which made it extremely difficult to choose especially for a newbie who's looking at specs and going well which one do I get there's a lot of cards that occupy this price point now in the past that existed because Nvidia was sort of adding cards to the family later on whereas what's making turning interesting is they're launching it this way so for instance we now got a 1660 and a 1660 TI so the 1660 is designed to compete directly with the 1063 3 gig not to be confused with the 1066 gig because although they use the same name 1060 there was no TI or anything like that just 1060 1063 gig 6 gig they were there was a lot of complaint from people like myself and the community as a whole because it was misleading in that it wasn't a truly a 1060 because I had shaved sm that had shaved cuda cores and had less memory making it truly an entirely different card well at least this time they've sort of changed the name up slightly with the TI and non TI version all right so the 1063 gig is kind of what we're comparing here to the 1616 on TI so we have 9 s ms found in the 1060 vs. 22 in the 1660s so that's obviously a huge jump a lot more cuda cores as well so 1152 in the 1063 gig versus the 1408 found in the 1660 so we have more sm which we have more cuda cores the base clock is improved as well so we have 1506 versus a 1530 and 1708 versus a 1785 now if we compare the 1660 to the TI it's only slightly shave so there's two less SMS at 22 versus 24 there's not that many less cuda cores as 1408 versus 1536 so obviously it's much closer to the 1660 ati in terms of what shaved versus the 10 63 gig so you're gonna see obviously a huge jump there we're not gonna go through all the specs but it is obviously a very big jump versus the 10 63 gig now with that also is a little bit increased price because the 1060 3g also came in at under $200 when it launched so you are getting a lot more for your money but that kind of leads us into the argument of value which can be a little bit convoluted now although Nvidia is comparing this card to the 1063 gig we're gonna do things a little bit differently here we're gonna kind of talk about 2019 pricing and where it stacks up today with the current price model it's obvious that this is gonna be an improvement and an upgrade for anyone running a 1063 gig or older a 9 series 7 series or whatever the older the card is obviously the better value this is be in terms of improvement but the discussion comes whether or not you should buy this card or save a little more or whatever so let's go ahead and take a look at the benchmarks when we compared it to the 1660 ti so you can see how far it trails and we're going to compare it to the 1066 gig because the three gigs a card that should have never existed and no one should have ever bought in the first place so as you would expect it obviously performs extremely well at its price point and it's I mean we looked at a couple of benchmarks above the old 3G testings we didn't go through and retest a 1060 3G like I said we were more interested how it compares to a 1066 gig and it's better than a 1066 gig which obviously shows you if this is closer to a 1066 gig then the 1660 Ti was obviously that much farther ahead so it's an amazing card given its price point but if you look at the launch pricing between like the 1063 G and the 1066 Jeep it's obviously slid up a few bucks and that's kind of been the trend lately and that's what's made a lot of people upset but we have reached a point where we can get nearly a hundred FPS and a lot of titles with a card at the $219 price point now this particular card the MSI gaming X the 1660 gaming X comes in at 249 dollars that is $30 less than the 1660 ti or the EVGA version which looks absolutely identical in every single aspect of this card is identical to the ti version is two hundred and nineteen dollars and ninety nine cents versus 249 so it's $30 less than this one so it's like a jump of 30 and then another jump of 30 so the problem here now it's when we had cards that occupied this $50 range in the past now we've kind of had these cards squeezing together in the $30 spectrum with cards in between because EVGA also has a two hundred and $29 and a $239 model and obviously MSI has its lower models and stuff but we did this because we wanted to see kind of how the custom card well they're all custom actually there's no Founders edition card with either of these same with the TI version this card here gives you obviously a nice brushed metal backplate there's no backplate found on the EVGA card this is a dual slot dual fan where that's a single fan triple slot similar to the ti actually identical to that like I said you have to start asking yourself is it worth having some of the extra shiny bits or the couple of FPS faster now I'm the kind of person that was subscribed to I would rather have the founders reference MSRP card and overclock that because as we found with our overclocking of the 1660 ti if you guys haven't seen that go and check it out we were able to surpass even six card with just a little bit of an overclock because the cooler was clearly able to handle it so this was only a couple of FPS faster in the test not $30.00 faster if that makes sense if you take the performance increase of this and the price prefer a percentage difference here obviously it was a poor value in terms of an MSRP card that's why you have to ask yourself what is it you want not a lot of people want a triple slot card like this so there's a lot of different options out there you just have to shop around and see which are worth it that brings us to the next question should we just save the 30 bucks add it to this card and then buy a 16-6 CTI the answer with NBS but as we found out the 1660 tea I should we just take another $40 or $50 save it and by 2060 and the answer is yes but at that point now you're almost $100 more than the MSRP card here but another way you can look at the financial aspect of this is if you're building and if you're buying just a graphics card you want 30 extra bucks in your pocket then you can do that but if you're building a system and you've got to stretch your money as far as you can go and you've got a hard cap you've got a hard limit you can't stretch that ceiling that is what it is you know I'm an extra dollar to your name then the 30 bucks you save on going to the MSRP model could mean the difference of getting a better component somewhere else maybe a little bit better memory maybe a little bit better speed memory possibly even adding an SSD like we use the you know the inland SSD which is the jury's still out on whether or not that's long-term you know friendly but it was one of those things where we've been using it and we did some testing and everything was great with it and so it's one of those things where you can potentially shuffle money around in the budget and the money you save here could go somewhere else and give you a better overall build I can tell you when it comes to my methodology in the way I shop in my mentality of that as I usually just go for the MSRP cards anyway as long as they they are not taking away features that I need for instance if it was a crappy cooler and the card ran way too hot and was way too noisy then maybe the extra dollars would be worth the acoustics and the temperature difference I can tell you right now neither of these cards make any noise whatsoever under testing typically you could touch a back plate or the back of the bear pair bare PCB while a test is running and feel like you're nearly burning yourself neither was the case of either of these cards because their coolers are extremely robust versus the amount of TDP heat these cards are generating because the Turing architecture although smaller a smaller process is not that hot once there's only 1500 or so CUDA cores in there versus the 4,000 some odd found in the higher cards so cooling and acoustics are typically not gonna be a problem on either of these cards even if you're overclocking them on the factory fan curve both these cards set in the low-60s and temperatures I mean it's there's nothing to really talk about in terms of comparison the cooler didn't make a difference on either of these cards just the BIOS in them boost the MSI card just a few megahertz higher which is what get us one or two fps increase so at the end of the day yes it is way faster than the 3G and even still marginally faster than the sixth gig and meaning you may not need to upgrade if you're running a 1066 gig this wouldn't necessarily be the card for you the TI would and they had to determine whether or not that extra pricing is worth it for you but in some titles this base model 1660 was even matching and beating our 980 classified when we just kind of looked at our charts for the heck of it so anyway you guys sound off in the comments below we had this discussion in our previous video with the TI and I'm curious as to how you guys look at this would you rather save a few extra bucks and one extra paycheck or whatever you have to do to get the next tier up in the same family what I mean by that is would you rather get a custom card versus the MSRP or would you rather save the money and get the next step up entirely when it comes to it the next tier graphics card I think there's a lot of differing opinions on this and some people make valid points on both sides of the fence so I'd love to hear you guys as opinion on that or you can just head on over to Twitter and tweet it at me as well and we'll talk about it there so thanks for watching guys and as always we will see you in the next one or the next graphics card video probably a 10 50 TI or 15 50 TI I don't whatever whatever I don't want tax Docs today I'm happy today and there's a note so cover me looking at my phone would be rolled that way that way you know that way I seem smart