NVIDIA's 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.

Unlike nearly all GTX 1660 Super cards that we've tested so far, EVGA's card includes a lot of features and comes at no price increase over the NVIDIA MSRP. EVGA gave their card a small overclock to 1830 MHz rated boost, which turns into a 2% real-life performance advantage at 1080p. Compared to the GTX 1660, the performance uplift is 12%, and the GTX 1660 Ti, which has 128 more shaders, is just as fast and pretty much rendered obsolete by the GTX 1660 Super because it is so much more expensive; that is, unless we see a price drop. EVGA's GTX 1660 Super is 17% faster than AMD's Radeon RX 590; the next-fastest AMD card, the Vega 56, is 8% faster. What's also noteworthy is that the GTX 1660 Super SC Ultra beats 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 the GTX 1660 Super for all gaming at 1080p, at the highest settings in almost all titles.

While the cooler on the ASUS Phoenix, which also comes at MSRP, has been a huge failure, EVGA's card does much better. The company picked a decently sized heatsink that handles the GPU's heat output very well, reaching only temperatures of 67°C, which matches other more premium GTX 1660 Super cards. However, noise levels are not good—we measured 39 dBA, which is noisier than all other GTX 1660 Super cards we tested before with the exception of the ASUS Phoenix that has an underpowered cooler. It seems EVGA wanted to impress with low temperatures. While I understand that some customers are fixated on temperatures because they are easy to measure, quantify, and compare, a better balance between noise levels and temperatures would significantly improve the product. Whether the GPU temperature is 67°C or 74°C, for example, has zero impact on anything other than the number in monitoring software. Lower noise levels, on the other hand, affect gamers every single minute they are gaming. People are becoming more and more noise-aware; the tremendous success of MSI graphics cards over the last years is testament to that. Looking at AMD's recent Radeon RX 5700 XT launch, PowerColor released the Red Devil, which is the quietest Navi card and one of the quietest AMD cards we have ever tested—that card has been flying off the shelves getting, recommendations everywhere, both from the press and users. I ran a quick test with lowered fan speed on the EVGA GTX 1660 Super Ultra and measured 34 dBA with the fan set to 50%, which increased temperatures to 72°C and is definitely worth it in my opinion.

I discussed this with EVGA, and they are looking into options, but it doesn't look like something is gonna happen soon. You can always use a custom fan curve if you are willing to do some manual tweaking. Where EVGA's card scores big is idle noise levels, which are perfect because the company includes the idle-fan-stop feature on this MSRP card, which is a rare sight. Thanks to that capability, users can enjoy a perfectly noise-free graphics card during desktop work, Internet browsing, media playback, and light gaming.

During disassembly, I noticed that EVGA uses very thick thermals pads on the memory; two are even dual-stacked for a group of memory chips. That is definitely not an ideal cooling configuration, but it seems they use this arrangement to provide additional stability for the cooler, which is mounted using four screws only. This approach certainly reduces heat transfer between the memory chips and the cooler, but it's not as bad as you might think. A significant percentage of heat travels through the solder balls on the bottom of the memory chips and into the PCB, where it gets picked up by the main cooler sitting right on top of the GPU. Now that of course results in additional heat for the chip, which increases its temperatures slightly, but we still measured good GPU temperatures, so that is not an issue. Memory temperatures are higher, too, but the card was perfectly stable in all our testing and could handle a decent memory overclock. The memory OC ended up a little bit lower than on other GTX 1660 Super cards, but the differences are not big (60 MHz, or 3% to the top memory overclocker).

We do know that AMD's Radeon RX 5500 comes with 8 GB of VRAM, while the GeForce GTX 1660 Super only has 6 GB. This will definitely become an important marketing factor 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 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 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. EVGA did not increase their card's power limit, which is not that unreasonable given the relatively compact heatsink and their focus on temperatures. On the other hand, allowing some manual power increases would help with the versatility of the product for overclockers.

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.

As mentioned before, EVGA's GTX 1660 Super SC Ultra comes at NVIDIA MSRP of $230, which is an extremely compelling offer not only against other GTX 1660 Super cards, but also the rest of the market. With price/performance that matches AMD's Radeon RX 580 and RX 590, the GTX 1660 Super is more affordable than we expected. EVGA's card scores with additional features, like idle-fan-stop, a metal backplate, and the company's three-year warranty. I'm really looking forward to seeing what AMD's new Radeon RX 5500 Navi card can do in this price segment. NVIDIA's new card 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; 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.