What is the nvidia gt 160, really?

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cyberhagen

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Mar 7, 2014
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I remember reading somewhere the GT 160 was a rebranded designation of a different model.
It's not listed as an official member of the 100 series.
I can't find info anywhere anymore.
I'm rreferring to the desktop version though, not the 160m.. unless it doesn't really matter?
 
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Do you have said gpu in your desktop computer right now?

My best guess is that it was an unofficial OEM branding of the previous 9000 series. I don't believe the 100 series ever made it to the desktop scene as new cards...correct me if I'm wrong though.

You could try downloading GPU-Z to see if it can tell what exact card you have if its in your computer.
 
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I know it's odd, but yeah, this is a desktop PCIe 2.0 card. The card is reported by both Device Manager and Skyrim as simply a, "GT 160". (the "m" means mobile/laptop doesn't it?) It's a PNY.


Skyrim is playable, but only on medium to low settings, and even then my FPS is bad enough to give a guy seizures when things get busy.
I'm trying to discover where in the hierarchy this thing falls, for reference, and upgrade without going too far.
I recently discovered my mobo (ACER IPIMB-AR) is not BIOS compatible with Kepler architecture, for example, the GTX660 I bought wouldn't POST. (This is not the UEFI version mobo, and it's been Gateway modified too)
Hopefully it works with Fermi arch cards though. I suspect this GT 160 is Fermi..but it could be a Tesla.

I'm ultimately trying to sort out the most powerful nvidia card I can get that will work with this mobo.
I do believe it's a renamed card, not an official released designation of nvidia.

I'll definitely look into that GPU-Z util, I didn't know about that.. thanks fudoka.
 
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If you can't use Kepler cards with your motherboard, the best Nvidia cards you can get would be the GTX 500 series, which was the last iteration of Fermi, with the GTX 580 being the fastest of the single GPU cards. It would only be considered midrange these days though, with newer cards like the GTX 660 and R9 270 offering similar performance to the 580. The 580 is also a power hungry card, so you need a pretty good power supply to run it.
 
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I just got home, downloaded GPU Z and ran it, it still detects the card's name as a GT 160, but there's this:

GPU = GF119

According to http://www.gpureview.com/nvidia-gf119-chip-181.html, it's probably a GT 520. The specs match well.
Core clock = 820Mhz, DDR3 ram, DirectX11 support..

Interesting! This clearly puts in the Fermi class then, which means I should able to get a GTX 550 Ti or 560 to work in my computer.
Slim pickings though, at least, for a decent price. I wanted a card with 2 GB memory, but those are nearly impossible to find. I'm not sure I trust eBay.
 
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Most 500 series Nvidia cards did not come with more than 1GB of VRAM. Nvidia's high end offerings like the 570 and the 580 only came with 1.2GB and 1.5GB respectively as a standard feature, it was up to the board partners to add more VRAM. In any case, 2GB of VRAM would only really benefit you if you were looking at a GTX 570 or 580. The rest of the 500 series cards were too slow to really take advantage of more than 1GB.
 
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That's really interesting about what gpu-z found! Yea I agree that you should try getting a 500 series card. If you're looking for a mid-range card, then the 550 Ti or 560 would be great. Also, don't worry about getting one that's over 1GB - mid range cards have a hard time using more than 1gb of vram (your settings won't be turned up high enough on a 1080p screen; i.e. antialiasing).

Just make sure you PSU has enough juice.
 
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I think a GTX 560 is a little rich for my blood.. or rather, my wallet.
I did some comparisons (especially where playing Skyrim is concerned, it's my main game) and I found a GTX 460, which by all accounts is somewhat better than a GTX 550Ti.

Now I just hope I'm not bottlenecked by my i3 core 2120. I should've got at least an i5.
Ah well.

 
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I came across that too, earlier, but sadly it's not applicable here; this is a slightly older machine that came with Win 7; there's no UEFI, no secure boot to disable, and no legacy mode in it's BIOS. The BIOS in this thing is the most stripped down version I've ever seen, actually.

I'm pretty much in the same boat as this guy:
http://forums.evga.com/tm.aspx?m=2020913

Apparently, Acer (mobo mfg) has pretty much come out and admitted, in so many words, that Kepler and above archs are incompatible with the older IPIMB-ARs that don't support UEFI. Even after a BIOS update to P01-A2.

Thanks, though.

 
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Well that bites.. after waiting days for Tigerdirect to ship my GTX 460 (I got my power supply already), they claimed it's backordered. I found it hard to believe they can get in more of a card that's discontinued, so I opened up a chat and they confirmed it's no longer available. Would've been nice if their website said so. They suggested a GTX 570 that's $100 more, but also ships from a 3rd party warehouse, that for anyone knows, is also out of stock. Not a bad price at all, but..pass.

I went back to Amazon, where I found an EVGA GTX 560 OC with 2GB GDDR5 that was just $20 more than the 460 I'd ordered. I only hpe that works. (it should, it's still Fermi)
Still, I feel like if I ever get this box of mine successfully upgraded, it'll be a miracle.
 
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