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MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming X 6G Review: Affordable 1080p Powerhouse - MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming X 6G Review: Affordable 1080p Powerhouse - MMORPG.com
So, you’d like to buy into the latest generation of Nvidia video cards but can’t afford the higher prices that come with RTX. We come bearing good news: MSI is here to help with the brand new GTX 1660 Gaming X 6G, a Turing powered graphics card beginning at only $249.99. Today, we’ll explain whether or not it’s worth the upgrade in our official review.
Comments
Joined - July 2004
Hard OCP can't get a review sample.
Tech Report can't get a review sample.
Somehow they do find a launch-day review sample for mmorpg.com.
Any further questions about whether Nvidia is trying to rig the reviews? Nothing against your review in particular, but against that backdrop, all launch-day reviews of the card should be taken with a heavy dose of salt.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
Probably until a new console generation rolls around. Since most games have to run on both PC and current gen (2013) console hardware.
Only a fool would buy one. They are not going for $250 either, the ones I have seen in the stores are $299 and $329 and yes they were from MSI. The 2060, which is a lot more powerful, is only running $40 more. Not sure what the Nvidia marketing people are smoking, but this card really has no market.
We didn't go through Nvidia. Not sure what their issue was. MSI seeded this model out to a number of sites, including mainstays like Guru3D.
The numbers also speak for themselves, so unless we want to talk about a theoretical "this card should $130," I'm not sure what other conclusion would be expected. And to be clear, the above ignores market conditions and is top subjective and anecdotal to mean a whole lot.
The problem is pretty straightforward: they send a review sample to sites where they expect relatively more positive reviews and not to those where they expect less positive reviews. The hope is that by punishing sites that are too willing to say negative things, they'll scare sites away from that and get artificially more positive reviews than they would have gotten if reviewers could say whatever they want.
In the case of this site, all hardware gets a glowing review, without regard to whether it's good or not. So of course they want you to have a launch day review sample. It might well be a fine card. But until sites that are willing to post a scathing review if the hardware merits it, we don't really know. Nvidia apparently doesn't have enough confidence in their product to risk that possibility.
Thank you for your time!
No, I think full well that Nvidia has a list of approved review outlets. I have never been told this but I think it's probably something everyone does and that, yes, they target their outlets. My point is that despite that, this card performs well. We can argue about relative value and to that I would say, you don't have to buy into this generation, but if you do, this is the most cost effective way to do it for a 1080p gamer. You're going to find a lot of reviewers agreeing there because it's a fact. Should it be less? Yeah, probably, but then bitcoin was a thing, and RTX further skews relative value, so even if it *should* cost less, it makes sense why it costs what it does.
On the point about positive reviews. I'm going to level with you - the team here are volunteers. When I seek out review opportunities, I do avoid things that are likely outright bad. For one, few people will read an article on something that looks like it sucks right out of the gate. Two, with that understood, I don't see the point in tasking someone with a review assignment that won't earn views and will waste their time. Now, that's for the clearly bad. We have reviewed a lot of mid range gear and higher end stuff that's turned out mediocre. We will and do say so, but the fact is, most computer hardware past a certain price is decent these days. Not all, but a lot.
I learned something early on as a games writer and now in tech. It's easy to be scathing. Frankly, it's a lazier way to write because you tap into an easy emotional response that does away with the more difficult task of objectivity. This is why gaming articles pissed off about this or that are everywhere online and resonate so much. They're easy and emotionally resonant. They're just not balanced, which is kind of important in critique.
Negativity is different and has its place but needs to be applied in a balance.
You ask any writer on this team and they will tell you I've told them the same thing. If something is bad, you call it out. Be honest. But also be objective. Very few things are all bad, especially when you're talking pc hardware that is frankly so similar between different models. Shockingly, hardware that costs $200+ or comes from some major company that's made similar products for the last 20 years, tends to do more right than wrong.
You combine those things and you have a lot of reviews that tend more positive but couch fair criticism in the text. Read the whole article and it's there. I know, I read through all of them, and I also know that the same is true on most major hardware sites. Check TechPowerUp. They do amazing work, but virtually everything gets some kind of award for exactly this reason. We don't do that because it's a different system, but this is how it goes in the world of tech criticism.
You commit to reading some $20 peripheral reviews, and I'll show you a lot more hard-line negativity. Until then, we'll take the more challenging authorial route of finding what's good and bad and presenting it in a way that I would be comfortable saying to the person who made it.
All GTX 1660 cards available on Newegg cost less than $250
https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100007709 601330988
I think you're confusing this with GTX 1660 Ti, which would costs something between $280 - $320.
GTX 1660 is well enough priced, and at the moment I think it's about equal or slightly better purchase than RX 580, depending on the pricing.
But since it's only about equal price/performance compared to RX 580, it's a bad showing for NVidia. This is their new architecture competing against AMD's old one, they should have been able to take the lead.
Pretty much this.
I honestly never saw the point of the 1660 series and/or more GTX for that matter. Shouldn't they be done with them? Or if they aren't done with them at least make them budget cards for under $200(honestly I'd pay $150 tops for this card).
Really looking forward to July 7th. AMD has really been changing the market with their more recent RX and Ryzen. Problem is Intel and Nvidia continue to try to be stubborn. Really hoping that after they will realize that lowering their prices a little is a good idea.
Quizzical does know his stuff. I have taken his knowledge for ten years on the hardware part of this site. From what I have seen he is mostly spot on. Not a bad idea to have him freelance some stuff because he could be a great addition to the team.
Well.... except for the exclusives... but I'll let that slide
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
My complaint about hardware reviews is not that a lot of them are positive. It's that I've never yet seen one on this site that was mostly negative and basically concluded, this product was a huge disappointment and you definitely shouldn't buy it. It's possible that there have been some such reviews and I just missed them. But there's an enormous difference between 90% of reviews being mostly positive and 100% of them being that way.
With game reviews on this site, that's not the story at all. Some games get--and deserve--highly positive reviews. And some get blasted as terrible. For example, this site gave League of Angels a 4/10 back when the game was a major advertiser on the site. And a lot of games are in between.
I certainly believe that you try to pick interesting hardware that is likely to be good as what you'll review. I could certainly believe that most of the products you review do what they intended to do and do it pretty well. What I don't believe is that you never guess wrong and end up with a lemon.
See here, for example:
https://www.hardocp.com/article/2016/05/05/rosewill_valens700_700w_power_supply_review/9
They had some nice things to say about the power supply. But the conclusion was that the +3.3 V rail ran way out of spec, so don't buy it, as there are plenty of other, better options.
My criticism here wasn't targeted at this review. Benchmarking is hard. I don't know how to say that without it sounding like sarcasm, but I mean that seriously. Getting measurements that you can put in a chart is easy if you're just measuring whatever is easiest to measure. Getting measurements that accurately reflect what you'd like to measure (in this case, mainly performance in whatever games you'll play in the useful life of the card, but also power and noise) is much harder.
Rather, my main shot was at Nvidia's efforts at manipulating reviews. I'm not sure what Tech Report did that made them mad. In the case of Hard OCP, it was probably publicly exposing the Nvidia Partner Program, and then later seriously investigating why so many of the early GeForce RTX 2080 Tis died so quickly.
That's nothing new, of course. Several years ago, one site (I forget which one) rated a GeForce GTX 590 as an "epic fail" because the card died in the review--one of several GTX 590s that didn't survive the review process on a variety of sites. The site changed the conclusion under pressure from Nvidia. Threats to lose future review samples and the page views that they bring does constrain what reviewers are willing to say on at least some sites.
I paid $2400 1986 dollars for a Commodore Amiga, was another $1100 if you wanted a 40 meg HD. I paid $1800 for a Samsung 286, $3200 for a Gateway 386, etc. etc. etc. I paid $2700 for a 1 meg 3d video card in 1992 for my first CAD which was a 486.
Consoles are bargains only problem is, that they only play games and movies. Computers can do so much more but that is only because of the locked and loaded proprietary software found on the consoles.
That isn't fair and is a slap in the face rip off to console gamers.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee