Skip to main content

Nvidia’s 1660 Ti could bring Turing power to laptops without ray tracing

Razer Blade 2019 review
Gaming laptops like the Razer Blade could support a 1660 Ti mobile chip in the future. Dan Baker/Digital Trends

Hot on the heels of Nvidia’s GTX 1660 Ti making its desktop debut, Nvidia may be planning to bring its cut down Turing GPU to laptops, too. Although Nvidia is keeping silent on the matter, a graphics benchmark result — that looks suspiciously like a laptop-targeted 1660 Ti — has been spotted, suggesting that it may not be long before Nvidia’s GTX 1060 sequel card is available to mobile gamers.

Nvidia has a number of mobile versions of its Turing graphics cards available already, from the superpowerful RTX 2080 to the Max-Q version of that same chip with lower clock speeds, and a much lower thermal footprint (that is our top choice for mobile graphics). But the two big RTX features, ray tracing and deep learning supersampling, aren’t exactly setting the world on fire. That, combined with a much lower price tag, should make the GTX 1660 Ti Turing graphics card one of the most popular of this current hardware generation and a mobile counterpart of that would likely see similar success.

The potential 1660 Ti laptop GPU was spotted on the GeekBench results repository. It has the designation, “N18E-G0” which, as NotebookCheck highlights, has the same naming convention as the mobile versions of the RTX 2060, 2070, and 2080.

That said, the chip in question is reported to have a total of 14 compute units, which is noticeably less than the 1660 Ti’s 24. That could mean that this is more of a GTX 1650 for laptops. Its maximum frequency is listed at 1,560MHz and its core is paired up with 4GB of memory. Its OpenCL benchmark score of 114,206 makes it around half as capable as the RTX 2060, according to NotebookCheck.

There is no indication of when this rumored mobile graphics chip will be made available to the wider public, but the GTX 1050 mobile chips launched a few months after the other mainstream cards from the Pascal generation. It may be that we’ll see this laptop graphics chips make its debut a month or two after the release of the desktop 1660 Ti.

Another option for midrange laptop gamers is the RTX 2060. Nvidia’s lowest-tier RTX graphics core has a full complement of RT and Tensor cores, making it capable of entry-level ray tracing and DLSS. It’s noticeably more powerful than the 1660 Ti, too, so it could be a good choice for those who want more than the 1660 Ti offers in both features and performance.

Editors' Recommendations

Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale is the Evergreen Coordinator for Computing, overseeing a team of writers addressing all the latest how to…
Nvidia may launch 3 new GPUs, and they’re bad news for AMD
An Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics card seen from the side.

In a surprising twist, Nvidia might be releasing not one, but three graphics cards. They all fall under the same RTX 4060 umbrella, although two of them are RTX 4060 Ti models.

This marks a strong entry into the midrange segment for Nvidia, with one of the cards addressing a significant concern -- low VRAM. Should AMD be worried about losing even more business to Team Green?

Read more
Intel’s upcoming iGPU might destroy both Nvidia and Apple M2
A render of Intel's H-series mobile processors.

Intel Meteor Lake might not see the light of day on desktops (not anytime soon, at least), but it seems that the mobile chips are going strong.

According to inside sources, laptops equipped with Meteor Lake chips may not even need a discrete graphics card -- the integrated GPU is going to be powerful enough to rival Nvidia's GTX 1650. That's not all, though. It appears that Intel might even be able to compete against Apple's M2 chip, but in a different way.

Read more
You should be using these 5 forgotten Nvidia GPU features
A hand grabbing MSI's RTX 4090 Suprim X.

Nvidia makes some of the best graphics cards you can buy, but the company says it actually spends about 80% of its time working on software. That includes a wide-ranging list of features on Nvidia GPUs to expand what your graphics card is capable of.

You may already know about some of these features, but in my experience, the software for both Nvidia and AMD graphics cards is woefully underused. If you have an Nvidia GPU, keep these features in your back pocket.
Instant Replay

Read more