MSI GTX 1660 Ventus XS OC Edition £199 Review

MSI GTX 1660 Ventus XS OC Edition Review

Introduction

We recently reviewed the latest addition to the Nvidia Turing range of graphics cards, the GTX 1660Ti.

This is a card that is based around the TU116 GPU, which sports all the Turing enhancements but without the expensive additions of the DLSS enabling Tensor cores and the RT cores which handle the hardware ray-tracing that was such a key feature of the RTX cards. This, of course, isn’t a major issue as all of our graphics cards have been been without those particular elements up to now.

What made the GTX 1660Ti a card which came with a huge amount of caveats was the pricing. At the low end, the MSRP base models, it was a very attractive proposition for anyone who is gaming at 1080P on a tight budget. Unfortunately the majority of third party cards took the opportunity to bedazzle them with lots of high end coolers and features which bumped the price up from where Nvidia had planned it to appear in their range into the heights of much more powerful offerings.

MSI nailed the GTX 1660Ti though with their Ventus XS OC Edition card, which came with a good cooler and performance but still hit the magic MSRP price point that would bring modern titles to those for whom money is not readily available. We know that when the purse strings are so tight even twenty or thirty quid can make a massive dent in your finances, and so if you wanted to take the opportunity to beef up your gaming rig, but without needing to save up for the next sixth months to do it, then the new GTX 1660 might be the very ticket.

Without the Ti element the clock speeds are a little lower, but then so is the pricing. Given how successfully MSI pulled off their Ventus XS in the GTX 1660Ti format, we just knew we had to see how the regular GTX 1660 Ventus XS performed.

Let’s give it a quick once over and then put it through our battery of tests.

Technical Specifications

The main changes on the vanilla GTX 1660 are the reduction of the CUDA Cores by 128, and the dispensing of the expensive GDDR6 for GDDR5. Otherwise it’s the same 12nm FinFet process, the same low power requirements, and in MSI Ventus form, the same cooler as it’s bigger brother.

MSI GTX 1660 Ventus XS OC Edition Review Â