The launch of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super today was far from a surprise. Rumors of the Super variants of the GTX Turing cards have been making rounds on the web for more than a month. Today they culminated into the launch of the first 16 series Super card, the GTX 1660 Super. Armed with GDDR6 memory instead of 5, it’s ready to tackle the Navi 14 threat.
But what exactly is new with the 1660 Super. Well, frankly speaking, it’s not new, it’s the same old 1660 with not-so-same memory. The GDDR6 VRAM featured on the GTX 1660 Super is almost twice as fast compared to the vanilla 1660’s memory.
| GTX 1660 Ti | GTX 1660 Super | GTX 1660 | GTX 1060 6GB | |
| CUDA Cores | 1536 | 1408 | 1408 | 1280 |
| ROPs | 48 | 48 | 48 | 48 |
| Core Clock | 1500MHz | 1530MHz | 1530MHz | 1506MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1770MHz | 1785MHz | 1785MHz | 1708MHz |
| Memory Clock | 12Gbps GDDR6 | 14Gbps GDDR6 | 8Gbps GDDR5 | 8Gbps GDDR5(X) |
| TGP | 120W | 125W | 120W | 120W |
| Price | Rs. 23,500 | Rs. 20,000 | Rs. 16,999 | Rs. 11,999 |
As you can see from the above table, the only difference is with regard to the memory speed, but it’s a big one. The standard GTX 1660 leverages 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 8Gbps while the newer Super variant runs a much faster GDDR6 (14Gbps) memory. This results in a healthy bandwidth boost which in turn improves performance in memory-bound games, especially at higher resolutions.
Testbench
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (Read the review here)
- Motherboard: ASRock Taichi X570
- Memory: Trident Z Royal 16GB @ 3600MHz
- PSU: Corsair HX1000i
- HDD: WD Black 4TB
1080p Gaming benchmarks
You’d think that most modern games are shader limited. You thought wrong, turns out that switching to GDDR6 does improve the performance by quite a bit. In all the five titles tested, the GeForce GTX 1660 Super either performs more or less on par with or beats the GTX 1660 Ti. That is pretty impressive considering that it is priced a notch below. The base GTX 1660 is for 1080p 60 FPS gaming while the Super is intended for 1440p 60 FPS or 1080p 75 FPS. That is the thin and thick of it. Of course if you’re primarily into shooters, you’ll get much higher frames.
1440p Gaming Benchmarks
The results are unchanged at 1440p. Moreover, the 1660 Super has an advantage over the 1660 Ti on account of its higher bandwidth. Whatever deltas there were between the two at 1080p are either gone or become really small. On the contrary, the lead over the vanilla 1660 is pretty significant here. Not surprising considering that the Super has a bandwidth higher by almost 90%.
Temps and Acoustics
The Zotac GeForce GTX 1660 Super runs pretty cool. During our benchmark runs, the temps mostly hovered in the early 70s. This is one of NVIDIA’s main advantages over AMD’s graphics architecture, the heat dissipation is much less pronounced. The card ran quiet and no notable fan noise was audible even during extended gaming sessions.
Conclusion
The Zotac variants retail for Rs. 21,390 for the Twin fan version and 22,590 for the factory overclocked AMP variant. One of the main perks of going with Zotac is that you get an extended 5-year warranty. The acoustics and temps are also quite impressive considering that this is one of the cheaper 1660 Supers on the market. So it’s official, the GTX 1660 Super makes the 1660 Ti obsolete. 1440p gaming at less than 25K!
PS: Just like the original GTX 16 series cards, there are no Founders Edition cards in case of the Supers either.
