NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Mobile

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti with Max-Q Design is a mobile graphics card for laptops that is based on the Turing architecture (TU116 chip). It is designed for thin and light laptops and about 10-15% slower than a regular GTX 1660 Ti for laptops (depending on the cooling capabilities). According to the specifications, the Max-Q variant clocks 22% slower for the base speed and 16% for the boost speed.

Compared to the faster RTX 2000 GPUs (e.g. RTX 2060), the 1660Ti integrates no Raytracing or Tensor cores. The performance is similar to the old GTX 1070 (Max-Q) but at a reduced TGP of 60 Watt (versus 80 of the laptop version 115 Watt of the desktop version). 

In April 2020 Nvidia refreshed the GTX 1660 Ti with the new codename N18E-G0-A1 with similar specs and pin compatible to the refreshed RTX chips (e.g., RTX 2070 Super Mobile).

The Turing generation did not only introduce raytracing for the RTX cards, but also optimized the architecture of the cores and caches. According to Nvidia the CUDA cores offer now a concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations for increased performance in compute-heavy workloads of modern games. Furthermore, the caches were reworked (new unified memory architecture with twice the cache compared to Pascal). This leads to 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal.

Nvidia specifies a power consumption of 60 Watt TGP (Total Graphics Power) and therefore 20 Watts lower than a normal (Max-P) 1660Ti for laptops. Therefore, the Max-Q variant is well suited for thin and light gaming laptops. The TU116 chip is manufactured in 12nm FFN at TSMC.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Mobile is a dedicated mid range graphics card for laptops based on the Turing architecture. It uses the same TU117 chip as the desktop version but for the mobile GPU all 1024 shaders are enabled. Compared to the faster RTX 2000 GPUs (e.g. RTX 2060), the 1650 Ti integrates no Raytracing or Tensor cores. 

There are two packages of the GTX 1650Ti, the GB4D-128 with a 128 Bit memory bus and a TGP of 50 Watt and the GB4B-256 with a 256 Bit memory bus and a TGP of 55 Watt (compatible with the faster RTX cards). The clock rates seem to be identical for both versions, therefore, the 256 Bit version should be faster.

The Turing generation did not only introduce raytracing for the RTX cards, but also optimized the architecture of the cores and caches. According to Nvidia the CUDA cores offer now a concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations for increased performance in compute-heavy workloads of modern games. Furthermore, the caches were reworked (new unified memory architecture with twice the cache compared to Pascal). This leads to 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal.

Compared to the bigger Turing chips (like the TU116 of the GTX 1660 Ti and the RTX lineup), the TU117 does not include the new NVENC encoder but an older one similar to the one used in Pascal and Volta.

The power consumption of the 1650 Ti for laptops is specified at 50 - 80 Watt TGP (Total Graphics Power) by Nvidia and therefore 5 - 25 Watt higher than the GTX 1650. The power efficient Max-Q variant of the GTX 1650 Ti is rated at 35 Watt TGP.