Today, we have five GeForce GTX 1660 Super reviews for you: ASUS Phoenix, Gigabyte Gaming OC, MSI Gaming X, Palit GamingPro OC and Zotac AMP.

NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 1660 Super is more of an incremental update than a radical redesign of the GTX 1660. While the GTX 1660 used GDDR5 memory, the GTX 1660 Super has GDDR6, which ticks at much faster speeds, too, increasing memory bandwidth by 75%. NVIDIA also priced the GTX 1660 Super much more aggressively, at $230 MSRP, to preempt AMD's Radeon RX 5500, which is expected to launch later this year.

The ASUS GTX 1660 Super Phoenix specifications suggest that the card is overclocked out of the box, to a rated boost 15 MHz higher than the NVIDIA reference. We're not seeing any of that; actually, the card seems a hair slower than the reference because it runs into the GPU Boost temperature limits quite often, more on that later. Compared to the GTX 1660, the performance uplift is 10%, and the GTX 1660 Ti, which has 128 more shaders, is just 2% faster and almost rendered obsolete by the GTX 1660 Super because it is so much more expensive; that is, unless we see a price drop. The ASUS GTX 1660 Phoenix is 18% faster than AMD's Radeon RX 590; the next fastest AMD card, the Vega 56, is 10% faster. What's also noteworthy is that the GTX 1660 Super matches GTX 1070 performance—a card that was considered upper midrange just last generation and has never been as affordable as the GTX 1660 Super. With those performance numbers, we can recommend GTX 1660 Super for all gaming at 1080p, at the highest settings in almost all titles.

With the Phoenix, ASUS has engineered an extremely compact card for the performance it offers. With only 17.5 x 12 cm, it should fit into all cases. The problem is that ASUS cheaped out on the heatsink. It doesn't use any heatpipes or advanced technology—it's simply a chunk of metal that's not too large either as there's a lot of unused space under the fan shroud. While the heat output of the GTX 1660 Super GPU is low, it is not low enough. In our testing, we saw the card run at 86°C when heavily loaded, which means it reaches the thermal limit at which NVIDIA's Boost algorithm starts limiting boost frequency to keep the card from overheating. Just to clarify, we haven't seen any overheating on our card, it simply ran at lower clocks, which cost performance. The clocks were still significantly higher than the base clock, which is the frequency the card will go to when it really overheats. Still, that cooler isn't good enough for a $230 product, and for that amount of money, I'd expect a backplate too. Even if it's just a plastic one like some other vendors use—it just adds to the look and feel of the product. Noise levels of the ASUS Phoenix aren't good either. At 41 dBA, it is simply too noisy, but I guess that fan speed is needed for the heatsink to cope with the heat. Idle fan stop isn't included, either.

We do know that AMD's Radeon RX 5500 comes with 8 GB of VRAM, whereas the GeForce GTX 1660 Super only has 6 GB. This will definitely become an important factor, mostly for marketing, to reel in less tech-savvy buyers, as upcoming consoles will have more VRAM than before and scaring people that what they buy today won't be enough tomorrow has always worked. However, our performance data shows that even the aging GeForce GTX 1060 3 GB doesn't see any significant performance deficits because of its 3 GB of VRAM—even at the highest settings with 1080p. The 4K results confirm that lack of memory will lower FPS, but 4K is unplayable either way on the GTX 1060 because of the lack of shading power; the same will be true for the 6 GB on the GTX 1660, so don't worry about that.

Turing has impressed everyone with its power efficiency, and the GTX 1660 Super can deliver here, too. Being based on the same TU116 GPU as the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti, we've not been expecting anything else. Both older cards are a little bit more efficient, which is probably because the high-clocked GDDR6 memory on the GTX 1660 Super draws a bit more power, but overall, the PSU requirements are minimal. This is an important factor because NVIDIA wants people to upgrade their prebuilt gaming PCs, too, and these often come with weak power supplies of questionable quality. Less than 150 W in gaming should be no problem for any PSU, and they all include a single 8-pin power connector, too. ASUS did not increase their power limit, which makes sense given the heatsink's capabilities, which is why the 150 W manual power adjustment limit is actually surprising to see—more than on most other cards. Maybe a power limit below NVIDIA reference could have helped.

The lack of ray-tracing and DLSS on the GTX 1660 Super seems like a big deal at first, especially considering how much NVIDIA is promoting those technologies. While both are extremely promising, they are not the most important things to have right now, especially in a market where every dollar matters. While I have no doubt that RTX support will be growing vastly, only a few titles support it at this time, so I don't think anyone could be blamed for skipping the tech for now, waiting for it to mature.

NVIDIA's GTX 1660 Super reference pricing is $230, which is surprisingly competitive in the current landscape. This puts the card on the same price/performance level as AMD's Radeon RX 580 and RX 590 and dials up the heat on AMD and its board partners. I'm really looking forward to seeing what their new Radeon RX 5500 Navi card can bring to this price segment. ASUS follows the NVIDIA reference pricing with the Phoenix, which is great, but given the weak cooler, I simply can't recommend the card. There are other alternatives in this price range that handle this better. NVIDIA's new pricing kind of obsoletes the GTX 1660 Ti, which is currently $275 and doesn't really bring much to the table to justify the extra cost; maybe NVIDIA could lower its price to $250 to clear existing inventory and then end-of-life the card. The next-fastest NVIDIA SKU, the RTX 2060, is $340 now, which leaves quite a big hole in the product stack. Maybe we'll see yet another card to fill this void at around $300, or AMD could try to capture it with an upcoming Radeon RX 5600. It looks like the $200–$300 market segment is suddenly going to become very interesting.