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.

Palit has overclocked their card to a rated boost of 1830 MHz out of the box, which is roughly in the midle of the factory-OC frequency spread we've seen among the cards we reviewed. This overclock translates into a 2% performance improvement over the stock GTX 1660 Super—not a lot, but that seems to be the norm nowadays with Turing. Compared to the GTX 1660, the performance uplift is 11%, and the GTX 1660 Ti, which has 128 more shaders, is just 3% faster and almost obsolete with the entry of the GTX 1660 Super because it is so much more expensive; that is, unless we see a price drop. The Palit GTX 1660 Super GamingPro OC is 20% faster than AMD's Radeon RX 590; the next fastest AMD card, the RX Vega 56, is 8% faster. What's also noteworthy is that the Palit GTX 1660 Super nearly 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 such performance numbers, we can recommend GTX 1660 Super for all gaming at 1080p, at highest settings in almost all titles.

Palit has engineered a cost-effective cooling solution for their GamingPro OC that doesn't break the bank. Instead of a metal backplate, they elected to go with a plastic backplate, which is much cheaper to make. Actually, I really like the look of their backplate because it reminds of the high-end Founders Editions, and the surface texture is a nice black matte, too. Now, some people will of course complain that plastic doesn't conduct heat as well as metal, but the differences are almost negligible as nearly all cooling is done by the main heatsink anyway. With 69°C, temperatures of the card are fine, but fan noise is a little bit high at 37 dBA. I would have wished Palit had focused more on noise than on temperatures, but given their cooler's capabilities and the card's pricing, I think their choices are not unreasonable. We've tested the ASUS Phoenix today, which is priced at MSRP and has a MUCH worse cooler that runs both hotter and noisier. It would have been nice to see idle fan stop on Palit's card to further improve idle noise levels. Palit did choose good fan settings for idle, though. With only 28 dBA, the GamingPro OC will be very difficult to make out in a case, especially when other actively cooled components are installed.

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. Palit chose to keep the default power limit of 125 W, which is reasonable given the card's cooling capabilities and pricing. What I really appreciate is that they did increase the manual adjustment power limit to 135 W—the NVIDIA reference allows no power limit increase at all. This makes things easier for manual overclocking, where people want as many dials as possible to play with.

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.The lack of ray-tracing and DLSS on 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. Palit is asking only another $5 for their card, which makes the GamingPro a no-brainer. Just the better cooler alone is worth that investment, and the backplate is a welcome addition, too. 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 discontinue 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.