When the GeForce GTX 1660 launched a last month we took a look at the variants from MSI here on the site and the Zotac Gaming model over on the YouTube channel and found them to be very competent 1080p gaming cards. When looking at the Zotac Gaming GeForce GTX 1660 I also recorded performance with a mild overclock as I was pressed for time and didn't have time to really dig in and push it to see just how much juice was left in the tank, turns out quite a bit.

The Zotac Gaming GeForce GTX 1660 comes in at the default clocks on core and memory (1785MHz Boost Core/8Gbps GDDR5) and held a typical boost clock of 1800-1850MHz depending on the game. We gave it a modest bump by +125MHz on the core and +250MHz to the memory taking the memory up to 8.5Gbps which is nice. But, after consulting with several other people who have these cards in hand to validate our final overclock and how achievable it would be we decided it was safe to roll with it. Settling in at a very nice +225MHz to the core keeping it around 2050MHz while gaming and an insane +999MHz to the memory resulting in an effective memory speed of 10Gbps on GDDR5 which is splitting the difference between it and the GeForce GTX 1660Ti GDDR6's 12Gbps. The Micro memory used on the GeForce GTX 1660 seems to be exceptionally efficient and matured well. This boosts the memory bandwidth from 192GB/s to 240GB/s.

I gamed on this card for well over a week at these settings and found zero instance of instability. I even played through the entire campaign of Anthem, I get if you cringed a bit, and a fair bit of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. So I decided to back up and record the performance metrics to see just how much extra performance you get out of this $219 card in modern titles.

Test Setup

We tested all the cards on our Z370 based test system with the Intel Core i9-9900k clocked to 5GHz across all cores with 16GB of DDR4 3200. We tested across DX11 and DX12 but as I'm writing this realized we didn't test any Vulkan titles, might be time to go back and add in Wolfenstein 2 into the lineup for good measure.

Test System