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Temperatures, Fan Speeds and Clock Rates
Gaming: Metro: Last Light
The Gigabyte card’s king-sized thermal solution keeps Nvidia’s TU116 processor cool without requiring the fans to spin quickly. We observe a brief period of passive operation, a quick pulse as the fans jump into action, and a slow ramp that crests under 1,900 RPM.
In comparison, the competing EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti XC Black Gaming gets all the way to 2,250 RPM because of its smaller sink and single fan responsible for dissipating heat.
Despite the faster-spinning fan, EVGA’s 1660 Ti doesn’t stay as cool as Gigabyte’s. Our GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming OC 6G operates at up to 65°C, whereas the XC Black Gaming hits 67°C.
Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition, which offers comparable performance to the 1660 Ti, nearly rises to 80°C through the same workload.
Gigabyte’s GeForce GTX 1660 OC 6G hits the highest clock rates—a necessity, given the number of on-die resources that Nvidia disables.
But when it comes to 1660 Ti cards, a glance at the red and blue lines shows how much more aggressive Gigabyte gets with its flagship model than EVGA can be at the baseline. This takes a slightly higher voltage, which is allowed by a more generous power limit.
FurMark
Even under the duress of FurMark, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming OC 6G doesn’t break a sweat. Its ~1,890 RPM fan speed looks a lot like what we saw while running Metro.
EVGA’s single fan must spin a lot faster to keep up, but both GeForce GTX 1660 Tis settle at fairly similar temperatures after 15 minutes of running FurMark.
FurMark forces Gigabyte’s top-end GeForce GTX 1660 Ti well below its rated GPU Boost frequency. Still, the card’s roughly 1,665 MHz is better than the ~1,575 MHz EVGA maintains at the end of our FurMark sequence.
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