Zotac GAMING GeForce GTX 1660 Review

We must admit to being very, very impressed with what Zotac has been able to do with the new GTX 1060 3GB replaceme… err the all new and totally different(patent pending) GTX 1660 series. They have literally distilled the very essence of what it takes to succeed in this corner of the market into one powerful little package. Here buyers want a compact card that will just plain work with their existing PSU, motherboard, and case. They want it to be as dead silent as possible. They want it to be good looking enough that will not be ashamed of buying it for their ‘hooptie’ system. They even want good 1080P gaming performance. That is a lot to ask from any single inexpensive video card, and yet this is precisely what the Zotac GAMING GeForce GTX 1660 offers.

As we saw throughout testing this itty-bitty card slots nicely in between what the older GTX 1060 and the GTX 1070 offered consumers before NVIDIA went in their ‘new direction’ with the RTX series. Equally important, is while yes a typical GeForce GTX 1660Ti will offer better performance… this card offers more than enough performance at 1080P resolutions for a lot less cost. So much less it may be a touch difficult increasing a build’s budget enough to afford the Zotac GAMING GeForce GTX 1660Ti. It really will come down to what resolution, and frequency response rate, you are planning on playing at.

Make no mistake the GTX 1660 is the spiritual successor to the venerable GTX 1060 3GB. As such it is a 1080P video card and only 1080P video card. At 1080P resolutions PC gaming enthusiasts on a tight budget can usually expect to get above 60 (and sometimes even higher) average frame rate per second in nearly any game they play… even with all the ‘eye candy’ turned on. However, once you start increasing the resolution above 1080P… the GTX 1660 starts to quickly lose its luster. This is where the GTX 1660Ti comes into play, as it has even more CUDA cores and noticeably faster GDDR6 RAM – which will help it handle higher resolutions more optimally. With that being said this is a corner of the market that really, really could make use of the ‘tensor’ portion of the RTX design. Via the use of DLSS these smaller core cards could have had even better value. Sadly, buyers wanting such advanced features will have to step up to the $350 range RTX 2060 series. That is one large step up in budget from this little GTX 1660’s asking price.

It is so much so that those cards cost well over the line for what the vast majority of consumers want to spend. There really are ‘magic lines’ in the value end of the market. The first is the $200 (USD) line and the next is the $300 (USD) line. These are the demarcation points for the vast majority of PC buyers on what they are willing to spend on a new video card. While yes this card does have an MSRP of twenty dollars over that magic 200 line, the fact of the matter is the Zotac GAMING GeForce GTX 1660 will easily persuade consumers to spend the extra couple dollars… it is just that good.

Since finding the Zotac MINI GTX 10-series cards are now well-nigh impossible, we can honestly see ourselves recommending and using this card for a variety of scenarios. Everything from a Home Theatre PC system that needs to handle 1080P gaming, to a 4K HTPC that needs to handle MADVR up-conversion duties, to typical sub 1K system builds… this card really does replace the older GeForce GTX 1060 3GB and provides much, much better performance. In other words, the Zotac GAMING GeForce GTX 1660 is the perfect addition to Zotac’s 2019 line-up and we can see them selling them by the boatload. As long as you understand its design limitations, and they match your needs, it will provide years of nearly dead silent pc gaming enjoyment. So be on the lookout for this nifty little card!