The Nvidia Geforce Gtx 1660 Super Review, Feat Evga Sc Ultra
First up is the $229 gigabyte gtx 1060 3gb , which sits right between the vanilla 1660 and the Ti version, both in performance and price. In a few weeks the GTX 1650 Super will also release, though, pricing has yet to be announced but it will likely be around $179 or so. The EVGA GTX 1660 Super SC we have for review sports a 1,530 MHz base clock and 1,750 MHz memory clock. EVGA lists the boost clock at 1,830 MHz, which is 45 Mhz above the reference clock speed of 1,785 MHz. The bumped-up specifications on the 1660 Super yield a small TDP increase from 120W to 125W. Most card partners recommend this card be partnered with a 500W or greater power supply.
The difference that makes is easily seen in the memory bandwidth the different cards offer, with the Super delivering 75% greater bandwidth than the straight GTX 1660. The comparison with the GTX 1660 Ti isn’t quite so stark, with the new memory system only having around 17% extra bandwidth than the top card. But, importantly, that still seems to take up a lot of the slack in terms of matching the lower CUDA core count of the Super card with the fatter TU116 GPU of the GTX 1660 Ti. At least that’s what the Nvidia GTX 1660 Super graphics card seems to be telling us. The latest GeForce Super card is the first to come sporting the GTX prefix, and also the first that doesn’t actually deliver a tangibly different GPU either.
Anything above this terrific 60 Super card, is worth skipping this going to the RTX side for an upgrade. With the new changes, the is not only significantly faster than the GTX 1660, but is also almost comparable with the GTX 1660Ti in terms of performance. So, if you are looking for a GPU that is capable of running the latest AAA titles at 1080p and smooth framerates, the supercharged GTX 1660 Super is the right choice for your gaming rig.
So if you’re wondering about the competing AMD parts in this performance range, you’ll have to wait a bit until the company decides to ship the RX 5500. The other interesting aspect about the GTX 16-series is the lack of hardware ray tracing features. There’s driver support for DirectX Raytracing , but generally speaking you won’t get much above 30 fps even at 1080p with the GTX 1660 models. With the RTX 2060 now starting at around $320 (and I’ve seen sales drop the price as low as $300), the GTX 1660 Ti is in a tough spot. I’d almost always encourage gamers to upgrade to the RTX 2060 over the 1660 Ti, since it’s only about $50 more. With the 1660 Super price of $229, that’s a big enough jump that the Super feels like a viable option.
So it will be interesting to see what NVIDIA actual does here, both in terms of card supply and pricing. The GTX 1660 has to come down in price to have any future; and if that were to happen, then it might make for a decent sub-$200 spoiler. w/8Gbps GDDR5$219The wildcard factor here, as is often the case, is AMD. The company has already announced some of its RX 5500 product family. However it’s not clear just what to expect from the cards in terms of performance, especially as AMD has been framing it relative to NVIDIA’s lower-end GTX 1650.
Both the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and 1660 use Nvidia’s TU166 Turing GPU, with the caveat that it doesn’t support RTX features such as DLSS and ray tracing like the RTX 2060. There is also the issue that pricing for all versions of the GTX 1060 is obviously lower than at launch now and I’ve added some of the cheaper examples to the above table. The GTX GB can be had for just $184/£164 and the 6GB card for $209/£190, the latter being practically the same as the GTX 1660. Nvidia swapped out the slower GDDR5 memory of the original GTX 1660 for cutting-edge GDDR6 VRAM in the new GTX 1660 Super, and oh, what a difference it makes. In our testing across a variety of games, the upgraded memory pushes the new card well beyond the original GTX 1660’s performance and closer to the frame rates pumped out by the $280 GTX 1660 Ti.
The Turing GPU architecture is a genuine advancement over the last-gen Pascal design, offering gaming improvements well beyond the ray tracing noise. We’ve been big fans of the Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti since it first arrived delivering the highest gaming performance we’ve seen in a GPU that costs less than $300. So long as we were talking MSRP versions anyways… there have been some factory overclocked cards topping the $300 mark and they’re harder to recommend. Compared to the similarly priced AMD RX 590 there’s no competition here at all, as the 1660 Super is faster across the board by a decent margin, so AMD will need a price cut to remain competitive at this price point. It also smokes the GTX 1060, making it a very decent upgrade to that GPU, as it runs between 20 and 30 percent faster in most games. The addition of a Walmart Protection Plan adds extra protection from the date of purchase.
The heatsink actively cools the GDDR6 memory through some very thick thermal pads. In addition to the hardware alterations, Nvidia also made some existing features more readily available. In a nutshell, NULL mode activates when the frames per second go above the refresh rate of the monitor, which Nvidia says prevents screen tearing without adding latency. Nvidia says that using NULL with G-Sync improves latency significantly compared to only using V-Sync, which the company feels offers a good balance between image quality and latency. Nvidia’s GTX 1650 Super will also use a TU116 variant and includes the Turing NVENC encoder, rather than the Volta encoder included in the original GTX 1650.
The thing is, while a $50 difference in price isn’t that big, particularly in the high-end and extreme markets, for mainstream and budget builds where every cent counts, the GTX 1660 Super is an easy recommendation. It’s nearly as fast as its big brother and costs less, and it outperforms anything AMD currently offers in the same price range (it’s about 20 percent faster than the RX 590). If you can’t go much over $200 for a graphics card upgrade and you’re still running a GPU that’s several generations old, say hello to the GTX 1660 Super. Something else to consider is whether a $230 graphics card will do everything you want. It’s basically around GTX 1070 levels of performance, a card from three years ago that was routinely available for $350 . These days, a 1070 is still fine for 1080p gaming, but with next-gen consoles due out next year with ray tracing features, I think the RTX 2060 and RTX 2060 Super are better long-term investments.
It is only the GeForce that is arriving on store shelves today, however. The GeForce GTX 1650 Super will be arriving at little later in November. NVIDIA is introducing some new driver and GeForce Experience-related features today too, which we will cover in a just bit.