Introduction

NVIDIA today released the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER, a mid-range graphics card positioned between the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti, which were 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 what the GTX 1660 commanded at launch and $50 cheaper 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. The 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 with solid FPS rates for 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 the GeForce GTX 16, but at lower performance than what the "RTX" cards offer. The GTX 1660 also receives other architectural improvements, such as "Turing" CUDA cores, which offer concurrent integer and floating point execution, adaptive shading, and a unified cache.

In this review, we take a close look at the MSI GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER Gaming X, the company's most premium product based on this GPU. The card ships with the Twin Frozr VII cooling solution, which combines a dense aluminium fin-stack heatsink with a pair of fans that turn off when the GPU is idling, and a metal backplate. Thanks to a factory overclock to 1830 MHz rated boost (up from NVIDIA's 1785 MHz reference), the card should provide some additional performance out of the box. MSI is pricing this card at $260, a $30 premium over the $230 MSRP for this SKU.