Skip to main content

Nvidia’s new GTX 1660 Ti and 1650 could power your next budget gaming laptop

Nvidia’s new GTX 1660 Ti and 1650 could power your next budget gaming laptop

/

Bang-for-the-buck Turing comes to laptops

Share this story

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Gaming laptops have never been so thin and yet so powerful as they are with Nvidia’s RTX graphics chips, and we believe the RTX 2060 is the sweet spot for price and performance. But if laptops with those chips are too pricey for your pocketbook, you’ll want to check out the new GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and 1650 mobile GPUs, which were just announced today.

Featured in laptops starting at $1,000, Nvidia says the standard GeForce GTX 1660 Ti can deliver 100 frames per second in today’s popular battle royale games, including Fortnite, Apex Legends, and PUBG, and over 60 fps with an $800-plus laptop sporting the new GTX 1650, each at 1080p resolution and high settings.

But as is typical with many of Nvidia’s recent chips, there is one catch: each of these new Turing GPUs comes in both a full-fat and a less power-hungry Max-Q variant, which can fit into even thinner laptops (including many that do double-duty for work and play) at the expense of some performance. With an 80-watt thermal envelope, Nvidia says the standard GTX 1660 Ti is only about 5 percent slower, depending on the game, than the 80-watt RTX 2060 we liked! But the 60-watt Max-Q version of the GTX 1660 Ti might be a slightly different story.

1/8

The chips will be most compelling if your current laptop is a little bit older. The 1660 Ti isn’t hugely more powerful (1.2x to 1.5x performance) than a mobile GTX 1060 already was previously. But Nvidia says there are tens of millions of laptop gamers still rocking a GTX 960M or earlier, and those users should see up to four times the performance from the new GTX 1660 Ti in modern games. You can see some more of Nvidia’s specific performance estimates in the gallery above.

The company says over 80 different laptops from every major manufacturer will feature the new GPUs starting today.

Nvidia’s also announcing a desktop version of the GTX 1650 today that starts at $150 and is meant to live alongside the previously announced desktop versions of the GTX 1660 Ti, which retails for $280, and the desktop GTX 1660, which costs $220.

Correction, 11:21 AM ET: Nvidia says the full-power GTX 1660 Ti is around 5 percent slower, not 25 percent slower, than the GTX 2060, depending on the game. Also corrected an Nvidia slide that swapped the base clocks and core clocks of the new chips.