Introduction

NVIDIA released the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER not long ago. It's a mid-range graphics card positioned between the GTX 1660 and the GTX 1660 Ti released earlier this year. The addition of the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER is necessitated by changes across the competitive landscape, specifically AMD's announcement of the Radeon RX 5500 series with which the competitiveness of the original GTX 1660 could buckle. The GTX 1660 SUPER is hence being launched at US$229, just $10 more than the GTX 1660 commanded at launch and $50 less than the GTX 1660 Ti.



The GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER has the same exact CUDA core count as the GTX 1660, at 1,408, and is based on the same 12 nm "TU116" silicon. GPU clock speeds are unchanged, too, with 1530 MHz core and 1785 MHz GPU Boost. The SUPER-charging of this SKU begins with its memory subsystem. The GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER gets 6 GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 14 Gbps, which is faster than even the 12 Gbps GDDR6 memory found on the GTX 1660 Ti and on par with that of the much pricier RTX 2060 in terms of memory bandwidth—336 GB/s, a massive 75 percent increase over the GTX 1660. With it, NVIDIA hopes to shore up performance by up to 20 percent without touching the CUDA core count and stepping on the toes of the GTX 1660 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 16-series exists to cater to the bulk of the sub-$300 market for solid FPS rates in games at 1080p, including the e-sports crowd. NVIDIA RTX hardware isn't available in this segment as the GPU would be too slow for real-time ray-tracing due to its size. DirectX Raytracing through software is available on all Turing cards, including GeForce GTX 16, but at lower performance than what the "RTX" cards offer. GTX 1660 also receives the other architectural improvements, such as "Turing" CUDA cores, which offer concurrent integer and floating point execution, adaptive shading, and a unified cache.

We have with us the EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER SC Ultra, the company's premium offering featuring an aluminium fin-stack heatsink with a direct-contact heatpipe base, twin fan ventilation, a single 8-pin PCIe power input, and a backplate. The card offers factory overclocked speeds of 1830 MHz GPU Boost. It's priced at $229, which means it offers a solid cooler, backplate, and overclock out of the box for no price increase over NVIDIA MSRP.