Tom's Hardware Verdict

Gigabyte’s Windforce 3X delivers practical benefits in the GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming OC 6G, facilitating lower operating temperatures, slower-spinning fans, and more aggressive clock rates than competing cards. While we’re typically not proponents of spending more money than necessary on mainstream GPUs, this is one model worth its modest premium.

Reasons to buy

+
Windforce 3X cooler is great for low temps without much noise
+
Slight factory overclock
+
RGB lighting
+
Fair price compared to base-level 1660s

Reasons to avoid

-
Overclock doesn’t do much for real-world performance
-
Extra-long heat sink takes up more room in your chassis

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Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming OC 6G Review

If you play your favorite games at 1920 x 1080, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card offers some of the best performance per dollar out there, along with excellent performance per watt. In our launch review, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Review: The Turing Onslaught Continues, we found Gigabyte’s GeForce GTX 1660 OC 6G to be more than 16% faster than a previous-gen GeForce GTX 1060 6GB at a similar 120W TDP (and a lower price).

Gigabyte’s GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming OC 6G is the company’s flagship implementation of the 1660, offering higher core clock rates, more aggressive cooling, and a bit of RGB flair. Typically, we’d expect those extras to impose a hefty premium. But Gigabyte only asks for an extra $10/£10 compared to its base-level models. That seems like a small price to pay for the benefits of a truly beefed-up board.

Right out of the gate, we know that the 1660 Gaming OC 6G sports a GPU Boost rating of 1,860 MHz, which is 75 MHz higher than Nvidia’s reference specification. Its TU116 processor is topped with a larger three-piece sink cooled by a trio of 80mm fans. We expect the big Windforce 3x thermal solution to yield measurable advantages when it comes time to take temperature readings, though it’ll be interesting to see how the 1660 OC 6G’s two 90mm fans stack up in comparison.

The aforementioned Windforce 3X cooler hangs off the PCB’s back edge by more than 2”. As you might imagine, a thermal solution designed to cope with RTX 2070’s 175W TDP and RTX 2060’s 160W power limit would be more than ample for GTX 1660’s 120W ceiling. Under the fan shroud, however, Gigabyte does cut costs with a less dense sink that weighs 1.49lb. (677g) instead of the RTX 2060 card’s 1.79lb. (811g). And although both designs employ a multi-part configuration, the 1660 Gaming OC 6G utilizes three heat pipes between them, whereas the higher-end RTX 2060 employs four. Those pipes are flattened in the middle and placed directly over Nvidia’s GPU, where they draw heat away before dissipating it through the fin arrays.

Three 80mm fans sit on top of the thermal solution. The outside fans spin counter-clockwise, while the middle fan rotates clockwise. Turbulence is purportedly kept to a minimum, generating less competing airflow from adjacent fans. Then, at idle, the fans stop spinning altogether by virtue of a feature that Gigabyte calls 3D Active Fan. Enthusiasts who prefer to maintain lower idle temperatures can disable 3D Active Fan using downloadable Aorus Engine software. Frankly, the fans make so little noise that we prefer to keep them spinning (even though the semi-passive mode is one of this card’s competitive advantages).

Around the fans, Gigabyte uses plastic gratuitously to form a shroud. Sharp angles and silver accents do look nice, though folds over the card’s top and bottom block air moving through the vertically-oriented fins. A freer-flowing arrangement, particularly above the heat sink, might have helped the already-impressive thermal performance. Instead, that’s where we find this card’s RGB-backlit Gigabyte logo.

We approve of Gigabyte’s display output choices. Three DisplayPort connectors and a single HDMI interface cover the most common multi-monitor configurations. Down at this level, VirtualLink support isn’t really necessary. And doing away with DVI yields a freer-flowing grille. Unfortunately, the potential benefit of additional airflow is lost since the cooler’s fins move air perpendicular to the bracket.

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Header Cell - Column 0	Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming OC 6G	Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 OC 6G	GeForce GTX 1660 Ti	GeForce GTX 1060 FE	GeForce GTX 1070 FE
Architecture (GPU)	Turing (TU116)	Turing (TU116)	Turing (TU116)	Pascal (GP106)	Pascal (GP104)
CUDA Cores	1408	1408	1536	1280	1920
Peak FP32 Compute	5.2 TFLOPS	5 TFLOPS	5.4 TFLOPS	4.4 TFLOPS	6.5 TFLOPS
Tensor Cores	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
RT Cores	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Texture Units	88	88	96	80	120
Base Clock Rate	1530 MHz	1530 MHz	1500 MHz	1506 MHz	1506 MHz
GPU Boost Rate	1860 MHz	1785 MHz	1770 MHz	1708 MHz	1683 MHz
Memory Capacity	6GB GDDR5	6GB GDDR5	6GB GDDR6	6GB GDDR5	8GB GDDR5
Memory Bus	192-bit	192-bit	192-bit	192-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	192 GB/s	192 GB/s	288 GB/s	192 GB/s	256 GB/s
ROPs	48	48	48	48	64
L2 Cache	1.5MB	1.5MB	1.5MB	1.5MB	2MB
TDP	120W	120W	120W	120W	150W
Transistor Count	6.6 billion	6.6 billion	6.6 billion	4.4 billion	7.2 billion
Die Size	284 mm²	284 mm²	284 mm²	200 mm²	314 mm²
SLI Support	No	No	No	No	Yes (MIO)

The GPU at the heart of GeForce GTX 1660 is specifically named TU116-300-A1. It’s a close relative of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti’s TU116-400-A1, trimmed from 24 Streaming Multiprocessors to 22. We’re obviously still dealing with a processor devoid of Nvidia’s future-looking RT and Tensor cores, measuring 284mm² and composed of 6.6 billion transistors manufactured using TSMC’s 12nm FinFET process.

Gigabyte takes this chip, with 1,408 CUDA cores, and bumps the reference 1,785 MHz GPU Boost frequency up to 1,860 MHz—a 4% increase. Six 32-bit memory controllers give TU116 an aggregate 192-bit bus, which is populated by 8 Gb/s GDDR5 modules pushing up to 192 GB/s. That’s comparable to GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, and a 33% reduction compared to GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. Combined with the loss of two SMs, dropping from GDDR6 to GDDR5 memory accounts for GeForce GTX 1660’s lower performance versus 1660 Ti.

Obviously, GeForce GTX 1660 is more mainstream than the other Turing-based cards we’ve reviewed. As such, our graphics workstation, based on an MSI Z170 Gaming M7 motherboard and Intel Core i7-7700K CPU at 4.2 GHz, is apropos. The processor is complemented by G.Skill’s F4-3000C15Q-16GRR memory kit. Crucial’s MX200 SSD is included, joined by a 1.6TB Intel DC P3700 loaded down with games.