Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super card is great for budget gamers. To increase the power, it builds on the GTX1660. It offers a boost in performance while staying within the budget graphic card range. This makes this card so appealing. You don’t need to spend more on the extra performance.
Budget gamers will not find the sweet spot for solid 1080p gaming at a fair price. Many of the GPUs on offer these days are too expensive. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super is the solution. It’s the ideal card for anyone looking to upgrade their gaming computer or take it to the next level with its increased speed and video memory.
In terms of price and performance, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super is somewhere between GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660 Ti. It’s an important part of the Nvidia lineup. It might be the best graphics card, considering its overall value.
Prices and availability
Today’s Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super starts at $229 (about AU$180, AU$330). The GTX 1660 Super is $10 cheaper than the GTX 1660. For the slight price increase, however, you get a significant performance boost with the faster GDDR6 RAM.
It also makes the Nvidia GeForceGTX 1660 Ti seem a little less relevant at this price. The GTX 1660 Super offers similar performance, but at $50 (about PS40 or AU$70), less. We would have recommended GTX 1660 Ti a few months back, but the GTX 1660 Super has replaced it.
Chipset and features
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super uses the same TU116 GPU as the GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660 Ti. It also has the same 1,408 CUDA Cores as 1660. The main difference between the original and the Supergraphics card is the increase in GDDR6 video memory. This results in a jump in memory speed of 8Gbps to 15Gbps – almost as fast as VRAM in the RTX2080 Ti.
Although this bump to GDDR6 helps bridge the gap between GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660 Ti it is not enough.
It’s important to remember that this GPU does not have the RT or Tensor cores found in the RTX 20 series of Turing graphics cards. This means that cannot technically enable Ray Tracing but it will make any game you attempt to enable it into a slideshow, more than any other graphics card. We accidentally disabled ray tracing in Metro Exodus during our testing. Even the menu was not usable.
However, you cannot expect a graphics card this lightweight to be able to compete with cars twice the price. The GTX 1660 does not have RT cores and the GTX 1660Ti doesn’t, so it makes sense that the GTX 1660 Super be limited.
The ports on the GeForce GTX 1660 Super are not very extensive. The EVGA GTX1660 Super SC Ultra was limited to DisplayPort, HDMI, and DVI. Although this is not a graphics card you can run 10 displays on, we wish Nvidia would drop the DVI port and include either a second HDMI port or a USB-C port.
You will also need an external power supply if you decide to pick up this graphics card, in this instance, an 8-pin power connector for PCIe. The GTX 1660 Super draws 127.4W in extreme situations. You should have at least a 500W power supply.
Performance
The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super graphics card is a beast, especially when compared to its competitors. The GTX 1660 Super was approximately 5% lower than its counterpart, the GTX 1660Ti, which costs considerably more. It was also 14% faster than the GTX 1660, which it replaces. The difference in Fire Strike was even smaller – it was only 2% slower than the GTX 1660T.
These performance gains carried over to gaming. Metro Exodus at 1080p showed that the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super averaged 41 frames/second (fps) compared to 38 by the vanilla GTX 1660 Ti and 44 by the 1660 Ti. It might seem like a small performance difference, but it is still important.
The GTX 1660Super dominated the Middle Earth: Shadow of War. It achieved an average of 79 frames per second at 1080p and Ultra quality settings. This title feels more like an average AAA game. You can expect great performance in all of your AAA games. Metro is a rare game.
The GTX 1660 Super is able to withstand heat even at 1440p. However, cracks can start to appear. Although the graphics card managed to achieve a respectable 54fps with Middle Earth Shadow of War it was unable to keep up with Metro: Exodus’ 32fps. This is technically usable but not enough to play PC games at 60fps. You can adjust some settings to make the experience more pleasant.
The GTX 1660 Super is everything we could ask for in terms of performance. It bridges the gap between GTX 1660 Super and GTX 1660 Super perfectly. It almost makes the GTX 1660TI obsolete by looking at its raw performance numbers. Although we aren’t sure if that was what Nvidia intended, it’s 100% what happened.
