Reviews Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Review feat. Palit StormX

I simply don't understand why AMD is setting voltages so high, when all accounts are that they are actually far higher than needed and are actively hindering performance.
Do they just WANT to be known as the under-performing and power-hungry option?

 

Because far from all cards can operate at those lower voltages.
Yields of packages using an interposer and HBM are low enough already, if AMD started binning out packages that required higher voltages to operate their supply problems would be even worse.

 

Yeah, AMD aren't doing it for fun, they're doing it because it's necessary to make sure that all cards run happily. Some cards will run fine at lower voltages but not all can.

That's why saying that you should buy one of these cards on the basis that you'll undervolt is dicey: it's a gamble on the silicon lottery.

 

They will all operate at lowER voltages, but some not as low as others. They've given them the fail safe option, and over egged it a bit. Maybe expecting people to overclock?

It's not a gamble as such. They still perform OK at stock clocks and volts they're just a little hot and noisy.

If you don't need every ounce of the performance just enable Radeon chill.

 

What he said. My 580 can drop from 1150, to a 1120 before it starts having issues and while it does give a bit of improvement, mostly in Ark, it's not anything to really write home about.

 

My mistake. I was under the impression there was a rather consistent undervolt pattern.

 

No it's like overclocking, you need to just go backward

I'm pretty confident now that mine is not fully 100% stable as I was having issues with FC New Dawn that I did not get in 10 hours of Metro. Basically something was happening to the PCI bus and my WIFI card was vanishing, causing the game to crash. I looked it up and it has happened to others (Bookworm error) so it may be the game.

Then again I have also put the side panel back on the PC and the temps have gone up to 70, so that may even be why. It's still a very fast capable card though, but it is noisy. Then again I'm not sure what I was expecting because I deliberately WCed my Titan XP in anger because of the whoosing noise it made.

 

Interesting to hear as a GTX 970 owner. I was thinking about a 980Ti next or a used Zotac 1070 mini. I only buy used these days other than storage. The £250 Vega 56 looks good, but will be hot & noisy for SFF. Green team has been my choice last 2 times for lower power use and heat. 1660 Ti should fit in nicely. More interested to see if 1650 is a gain over 1050 and still available in LP format.

 

I game at 1920x1080 with a 970 Strix. If I was going to upgrade a 1660 TI would be ideal. I don't care about RTX. Gonna be a while before that takes off.