£249 for EVGA’s 6GB 1660Ti is a cracking deal for one of the best pure gaming graphics cards pre-Prime Day

The jury remains out on the real value of Nvidia’s RTX ray tracing tech in actual games. While that debate rages on and we wait for a decent number of ray-traced games to appear, why not grab yourself an EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti XC Black Gaming 6GB board? We're not 100-percent sure just what deals are coming on Amazon's Prime Day just yet but for £250 this is the best value GTX 1660 Ti we've seen to date, especially in the UK.

Back to the whole RTX issue By the time the whole ray tracing thing has shaken out it’ll probably be time for a new graphics card, anyway. In the meantime, you’ll be enjoying Nvidia’s fantastic GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics chipset. It doesn’t support ray tracing. But that means the entire chip can be devoted to rendering conventional raster-based gaming graphics. Which is, of course, what almost all games exclusively rely on for now.

For your £249, you get 1,536 of Nvidia’s latest Turing-spec turing cores. That’s a decent step up from the old GTX 1060, which made do with 1,280 cores. All told, the 1660 Ti packs 6.6 billion transistors designed to do just one thing, make games run great. The 1060, for the record, weighed in at 4.4 billion. The 1660 Ti also has 6GB of much faster 12Gbps graphics memory where the 1060 was clocked at 8 Gbps. Sure it's no RTX 2070, but then that card comes in at its cheapest at almost £180 more than this thing.

With those numbers, this EVGA board sticks pretty closely to Nvidia’s reference specifications for the 1660 Ti chipset, which is no bad thing. It’s also usefully compact in length, though it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s a triple-slot card in terms of depth, and comes with EVGA’s Precision X1 tuning software.


Outstanding all rounder for up to 1440p gaming

Let’s be clear. The EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti XC Black Gaming is no 4K gaming monster. It’s a mid-range board targeted at 1080p and 1440p gaming. Most modern games will run very nicely at 2,560 by 1,440 pixels with frame rates above 60fps. Even the most demanding titles will be pretty smooth and kick out at least 40 frames per second at maximum detail settings. Pretty much everything will fly at 1080p. If you’re looking for a really powerful but reasonably affordable Battle Royale board for the likes of Apex Legends, Fortnite and PUBG, this should be your weapon of choice. Not bad for a sub £250 card. Not bad at all.