Gadgetory

you ever feel like you go a while without any graphics card releases and then suddenly there's all the graphics cards origin PC builds high-performance custom pcs for gamers and professionals backed by 24/7 us-based support team their award-winning high-end pcs offer the latest and best components for gaming and workstations origin PC also created exclusive desktop designs including millennium and Genesis desktops with patented variable mounting technology and now offer a new lineup of laptops with GeForce r-tx graphics cards customize your own origin PC desktop or laptop with a 7 some 970 Evo plus nvme SSD featuring read speeds of up to 35 hundred megabytes per second and write speeds up to 3,300 megabytes per second for more info on Origin PC systems and the samsung 970 ebo + SSD click the link in the description below well this is probably the worst kept secret ever in graphics card history that of the new NVIDIA GTX 16 60 TI a name that still have no idea what it means even in Nvidia is like reviewers guide there's no mention of what 1660 Ti is I mean so it's based on the TU 116 core right the new the whole new architecture whole new touring architecture with just CUDA cores and obviously the SMS in there and stuff but it's 116 right tu 116 so they could have called it the GTX 1161 1 6 TI or whatever nobody says so we still know exactly why it's called a 1660 TI but and I even asked couple the AIB is like hey what does it mean they're like this is clearly a step up from the GTX 1060 and then they're using the 960 in lot of their materials because they like to kind of go back to generations because they find most gamers hang on to their graphics cards for approximately two generation cycles so how long Pascal lasted and how many years that was around solid 2 years if you still have a 960 it means your cards three and a half or so years old potentially even older which means it start to get a little long in the tooth so we were kind of torn like what exactly is this card aiming for it I mean it's got 1560 cuda cores this is the 1280 that was found in the GTX 1060 this guy right here both still have 6 gigs of VRAM however the 16 60 TI and I know I'm gonna say that wrong at some point in here like I know I'm gonna say the name wrong or mixed up just know what I mean okay it has also six gigabytes of vram however it has G DDR six running in a total of what 12 gigabit per second versus the eight gigabit per second found on the 1060 s six gigabytes of gddr5 so there's obviously a step up there there's some architectural improvements as well that you guys come sure can learn more about in depth on some of the other more deep dive tech channels like Steve it gamers Nexus or digital foundry and hardware you know a lot of different hardware sites there's a major improvement to the way FP and the integers you know the the instruction sets are actually being accessed and working simultaneously now rather than kind of alternating so that's basically I guess kind of like an asynchronous compute which is where they're getting a lot of the shader improvements in which is why you're seeing a lot of improvement massive improvement actually compared to the 1060 even with this small generational gap from I call it small secondly not it's a whole new core obviously if the touring architecture but that's why we got a significant increase of 25 or more percent across the board when you compare these two generations but we didn't stop there because this card does not exist in in videos portfolio what I mean by that is there's no founders edition card there was a founders edition 1060 which is kind of interesting to me that they didn't do one this time around this is one where Nvidia obviously designed the core and then they're involved in you know a lot of the you know blueprint designs on how they came to the AIB and how they implement them but it's up to the AIB to come up with their own solution now for many many years this is the way Nvidia operated until Pascal came out yeah I think Pascal was where they actually went into the retail market themselves selling cards direct to the public where previous to that all it was was reference cards that were available ever a little bit let's start through the AI B's and then they would kind of disappear in custom cards who are you found so what you're gonna find is a huge variance across the market between these car the way these cards are implemented so I've got a lot to talk about with this review I'm gonna get sort of just right into it right now with the benchmarks and before we do that I'm gonna tell you the logic behind the cards that we chose this right here is the gtx 1660 TI Strix as you can tell is a massive card it's got the quite essential Strix appearance to it it's clearly the biggest of the cards that we have this is their phoenix card this is our entry level this is the MSRP card this is the massive markup card and then actually there's a card missing from here we're actually testing against a 2060 as well just to see how the 260s hold up we've got the MSRP card another MSRP card from EVGA these do not have a markup over the MSRP pricing which nvidia kind of controls the map on that or minimum advertised price again a custom implementation triple slot for such a small card which is kind of funny funny a single fan but massive cooler on there and then this is the gtx 1066 gig we're not testing the three gig that card should have never existed in my opinion opinion i said that then i agree with it it's still today and then at the last minute we got an email from AMD no surprise it happens all the time any time one company is getting ready to launch something we start hearing from both sides going hey don't forget about us and la blah so we're gonna email from AMD saying hey you can now get a vega 56 for 279 Knox we're like no so we click the link we go to new AG and of course that's that's a msi card with a very basic cooler one that's terrible even worse than that although this isn't terrible cooler it's typically the cards that come with lower style like this are not the greatest coolers it's a garbage cooler as far as I'm concerned but a bigger 56 for 200 bucks say it isn't so well they were all sold out there was only one SKU all the rest of the SKUs on the market were four hundred plus dollars so I wrote them back to my guys there's only one card at that price and it's gone and we need I reached out for comment are they gonna be more cards available at this price point or just this ones we're waiting to see so for the heck of it because at least for a minute you could get a Vega 56 for $230 we went ahead and put this on the the benchmarks to to see how it compares and because of that we sort of took the 590 off the charts all together because what AMD effectively did is that they truly reduce the price of a Vega 56 and not just some introductory thing or a temporary thing because of the launch of the new 16 60 TI they sort of cut off their own 590 as making sense unless they dropped that $200 which then it makes sense again so that was sort of our logic so we're be testing one two three four five six cards and seeing how they stack up in this sort of a 300 dollar battle royale so here's how they stack that so here's my first kind of complaint we actually have three asus strix models that range in price from three hundred and nineteen dollars and ninety nine cents all the way up to three hundred and twenty nine dollars and ninety nine cents so slight variances between the cards fits my problem you are now biting up against our TX twenty sixty pricing of MSRP of around three hundred and fifty bucks so i mean i guess three hundred seventy nine ish at that point it's like should you save the extra twenty to thirty bucks or so i think so the phoenix card even this guy right here they are they have a dual a gtx dual sixteen sixty TI which is 304 and 309 five dollar differences why do you have a skew for difference of five bucks now EVGA also sent us their MSRP model this is another two hundred and seventy nine dollar sixteen sixty TI which if we compare the MSRP cards what you typically find is they don't stand up very well but what you'll find with the Strix card is obviously it's got a premium build quality it's all custom PCB as they all are be in this particular round still uses single a pin power on there but you've got the RGB header on the back you've got the additional fan headers all the strict stuff you'd come to expect nice black anodized plate but you gotta ask yourself is that worth sixty dollars more than a base card now the base cards build quality clearly isn't nearly as nice there's no backplate on here the cooler is kind of flimsy i mean that it's just a chunk of aluminum sitting on top of the actual core very similar to like a stock intel cooler so there's no heat pipes or anything in here you do have what looks like a copper core on there but yeah it's just very basic single fan in fact this card got up to 81 degrees not overclocked but it still actually outperformed the EVGA card ever so slightly even though this card has a better fan in my opinion much bigger heatsink actual heat fins and pipes versus just a basic core sitting on top of a you know big chunk of aluminum and copper this feels like a much better build quality for me for the same price even though it boosted slightly lower now the sixteen sixty TI has a base clock of 1500 megahertz and a boost clock average of 1770 now basically GPU boost 3.0 dictates how far the card will self overclock depending on a couple of parameters right temperature Headroom power draw Headroom and then GPU usage so if it's maxed out already and it's hit any of those other factors it'll kind of self-regulate it's clucks so this card sat at an average of about 1830 when I was comparing it in precision x1 whereas the phoenix card although not built as robust and ran much hotter sat at a higher average about 1875 so that's why this card was showing slightly better performance than an EVGA card now overclocking was not taken into effect in any of these cards this was just out of the box settings no slider touches no fan curve touches just you stuck him in the CPU how did it perform the Strix card sat much higher in about the 1950 range temperatures on the EVGA card set at a max of 66 in the Strix card was at max of 61 so a heck of a lot cooler but as we'd expect massive cooler with three fans now I didn't do over any overclocking on this because I found some anomaly as I want to sort of do a separate overclocking video because I there's some stuff I couldn't really explain that being even though I was giving this card additional megahertz to the CPU it wasn't it wasn't doing math properly what I mean by that was I was adding 100 to the core on this and it still boosted to about 1950 1930 which is what we expected plus 100 so I might find this do plus 200 it then tried to do 20 175 which is where it kept crashing and then I did plus 150 and it still was doing the 1930 range so I think there's gonna need to be some precision x1 improvements afterburner still needs to be updated for these cards but I can tell you right now if I had to make a choice on MSRP cards then I would certainly choose the EVGA over the Phoenix just because of the better cooler which should give us better overhead once we see how the software is going to react to it now clearly it destroys the GTX 1060 as should be expected and considering what a lot of people were mad about with the 2060 was they were comparing it to a previous 1060 card and saying why the premium why the massive hike of what 379 I think it is or 349 I remember the exact price I'm sure phil can't stick on screen somewhere people really mad about that or what you can see now is that the same MSRP basically as the 1066 gauge launched at you are now getting significantly more performance for that and you're not paying for the extra features which a lot of people don't necessarily want to adopt you today DXR r-tx tensor cores and all that but you do get the touring architecture improvements with t1 16 then running with the Pasco architecture but what about Vega well there's still some questions like I said we don't know if they're gonna be reducing the price of the card across the board I still can't imagine them menu factoring Vega Vega 56 even for 279 Lux I don't think it's possible heck even gamers Nexus did a really good piece about how much it costs for hvm to to be manufactured and just the chip the core and memory array on here was about 300 bucks so I don't know how they could possibly be doing that which is why I think just that one SKU for a limited time is going to be the $250 card just trying to cause some disruption in 1660 ti adoption now let's talk about the Strix card for a second at three hundred and thirty dollars I don't think it's worth it I don't think it's worth it I don't think it has a $60 premium in there and now it's gonna go for any brand I don't care if it's Asus EVGA ZOTAC MSI gigabyte all of them anyone that wants to charge 330 dollars for a 1660 Ti is basically out of their mind because it's too close to the price of the MSRP for the 2006 tee which you can find you can find them and at that point the speed improvement and the gaming improvement from 2060 versus 1660 Ti makes it worth waiting an extra month or setting aside another paycheck or two with a couple bucks set aside to be able to improve because you are going to be getting what feels like an entire generational improvement of graphics card just between you know these two tiers the 2060 versus the 1660 TI it's gonna be just as much of an improvement is going from 1060 to 1660 TI so in my opinion there's no point in buying any 1660 Ti over $300 I think it just makes no sense which means what I said one of my previous video is that 2019 is gonna go down is one of the suckiest years for graphics cards it's not just graphics card performance because as you can see Turing to you 116 is amazing in my opinion it's just the pricing is all over the place and everything is just up in the air and nothing's really landed so that's kind of I'm mad on all of this so that's where the pieces kind of land and I wasn't gonna give you guys an individual review for a Strix and a Phoenix and this just being a black edition I was gonna do that I mean that's just too repetitive so I probably won't review another 1660 T I might use them and some build guides and stuff depending on certain price points and stuff Strix aside I I think the extra features are a complete waste of money personally but sound like a broken record now the question is you guys were the buyer I'm one person but you guys speak in volumes and you do it with your pocketbooks so if you were shopping for a graphics card right now would you buy a 16-6 TTI and if so which one would you stick with MSRP or would you go with a premium card or if you're considering a premium card would just wait a little bit longer and get a 2060 so sound off in the comments below guys or hit me up on Twitter at Jase 2 cents let us know what you think and yeah great performance if you stick to the MSRP they gave us an email saying hey guess what you could get RTX no not even r-tx wow that would be a funny email from AMD Radeon rx 50 split so we got it