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Temperatures, Fan Speeds and Clock Rates
Gaming: Metro: Last Light
Both previous-gen Founders Edition models ramp up slowly during our Metro: Last Light benchmark. Given their centrifugal fans, we’d expect them to spin faster and make more noise to achieve similar thermal performance as EVGA’s GeForce GTX 1660 Ti XC Black Gaming. Instead, it’s the 1660 Ti that quickly crests 2,250 RPM. It’s not as loud as AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 56, despite a higher rotational speed. But it’s not as quiet as the Founders Edition cards, either.
At least the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti XC Black Gaming’s fan keeps TU116 nice and cool. Whereas GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition butts up against 80°C, EVGA’s card doesn’t break 70°C.
Voltage and clock rate do fall slightly over the course of three Metro: Last Light benchmark loops. The 1660 Ti starts around 1,900 MHz and ends the sequence closer to 1,800 MHz. That’s higher than Nvidia’s 1,770 MHz GPU Boost rating. However, we’ve seen other 1660 Tis capable of maintaining more aggressive settings.
FurMark
Radeon RX Vega 56 and GeForce GTX 1070 FE come closer to GeForce GTX 1660 Ti XC Black Gaming’s fan speed under FurMark. But EVGA’s card still spins fastest, matching our readings in Metro.
Our GeForce GTX 1660 Ti actually runs cooler through 15 minutes of FurMark than it did in our real-world gaming workload.
Bumping right up against its power limit, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti XC Black Gaming has no choice but to throttle back voltage and clock rate. By the end of our 15-minute test, TU116 is under 1,600 MHz at just over 0.800V.
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