MSI GTX 1660 Ti "Ventus" 6GB OC review

DrDave — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 19:25:07 +0000

MSI GTX 1660 Ti--bought this from Amazon when my previous MSI 780 ti bricked. Would have preferred another brand since the previous one did stop working, after all, but this one was available next day and production time yada yada. Arrived 14 hours later at 2:30 pm. Bit of a struggle for some reason to get the port end into the side slots but it did go in.
Card is, if anything, more compact than the previous 780 ti, and uses less power, with a better overall finish. There's a back plate to cover the fish and chips on the circuit board. Fans are OK noise wise but not the quietest (Zotac, for example, quieter under load).

I was dubious about the memory bandwidth and CUDA cores, but, in fact, no worries, the newer design more than compensates. Playback and export in Premiere only uses 60-70 percent of the card, even with 4K clips with a ton of filters, so this card is fine for most people. You can step up to the 20 series but it is an incremental gain. Normally I buy these cards on eBay because gamers upgrade so often, but I had to plunk down $270 for a new one and overnight shipping to keep working.

Using Neat Video, interestingly, the optimum frame rate uses only the GPU! That frees up the CPU. Getting over 6fps render in Neat video with 4K clips using GPU only. Not great, but slightly better than what I had before. The 6GB ram seems OK for 4K, I doubt it will handle 8k but whatever. Has display ports and HDMI 2.0

MSI terminology for the flavors of these cards is confusing, and Ventus sounds like a coffee term, and you may have to install the USB C driver even if there is no port. There's a "super" version of the 1660 which has a few less CUDA cores that is also a bit cheaper. Knowing nothing, I went for the higher CUDA core model. Overall, a solid card.

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MSI GTX 1660 Ti "Ventus" 6GB OC review