A much-rumored GeForce GTX 1660 has all but been confirmed via a leaked photo that is reportedly sourced from an NVIDIA board partner meeting. This means that we may very well be seeing the introduction of a new line of midrange video cards coming from NVIDIA that will occupy the space in between the 10 series and the newer high-end cards in the RTX 20 series.
The rumors surrounding this new NVIDIA card has most recently been fueled by a leaked photograph. The photograph first surfaced on the hardware-oriented website Videocardz.com. It shows a partial view of an NVIDIA card with “GTX 166” on it and the final number obscured by fading. The caption to the left of the card simply states “One more thing” followed by “New GTX Turing” on the following line.
Reports of the GeForce GTX 1660 first surfaced in December of last year when a Chinese website listed the card alongside a 1660 Ti. Supposedly, this new series of cards will take the place of the rumored RTX 2050. Another bit of interesting data is what appears to be benchmark stats for a 1660 Ti from graphics card leaker APISAK on Twitter:
AOTS – GTX 1660 Ti High (1080p) Score 7400 ( Laptop )
GTX 1060 High (1080p) Score 6200 ( Laptop ) pic.twitter.com/wdQ1lgFJ1C— APISAK (@TUM_APISAK) January 21, 2019
While the pieces of the puzzles are certainly coming together nicely, we still have yet to hear anything in the way of an official announcement from NVIDIA. CES 2019 has come and gone with nary a mention of the GeForce GTX 1060 and 1060 Ti. Typically, an announcement of this importance would take place at a large trade show like CES. The next most likely candidates for an official debut of a new graphics card line are E3 2019 in June and Gamescom 2019 in August.
It bears mentioning that the evidence we have for the GeForce GTX 1060 is far from concrete. The leaked photograph certainly adds a bit of credence to the rumor, but there hasn’t been anything shown yet that couldn’t have been put together by a talented-enough image editor. Unless NVIDIA decides to break the mold and announce things earlier, we may very well be waiting for a few months until we hear something straight from the horse’s mouth.
