The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super Review, Feat. EVGA SC Ultra: Recalibrating The Mai

[harlan4096]

After taking a break following the launch of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 20 series Super cards, as well as AMD’s new RDNA architecture-based Radeon RX 5000 series cards, the video card market is heating back up again just in time for the all-important holiday shopping season. Looking to fill in the mainstream portion of the market, AMD is already shipping its Radeon RX 5500 series cards to OEMs – with retail to follow shortly – and meanwhile NVIDIA is making its own machinations for the market.

Kicking off the first of the actual hardware launches for this holiday rumble is NVIDIA, who is announcing their GeForce GTX 1660 Super. This is a relatively minor, but none the less interesting revision to the GTX 1660 family that adds a 1660 (vanilla) SKU with faster GDDR6 memory for improved performance. Along with the GeForce GTX 1650 Super (shipping in late November), these two cards are going to be the backbone of NVIDIA’s mainstream efforts to close out the year. And while NVIDIA’s other GTX 1660 cards aren’t going anywhere, as we’re going to see today, with its $229 price tag, the GDDR6-equipped GTX 1660 Super is pretty much going to make the other 1660 cards redundant.

The fourth Super card to be launched by NVIDIA, the GTX 1660 Super is a bit of a harder read than the high-end cards that launched this past summer. In terms of performance, the card is just shy of the GTX 1660 Ti, and priced just north of the GTX 1660 (vanilla). But unlike the other Super cards, this launch isn’t the same kind of transparent price shuffle that the earlier launch was; NVIDIA isn’t discontinuing any cards this time, and the retail shelves will be shared by all three GTX 1660 series cards for the months to come. None the less, this latest card does at least fill the same basic role of serving as a kind of mid-generation kicker – even if the original GTX 1660 only launched 7 months ago.

The wildcard factor here, as is often the case, is AMD. The company has already announced some of its RX 5500 product family. However it’s not clear just what to expect from the cards in terms of performance, especially as AMD has been framing it relative to NVIDIA’s lower-end GTX 1650. So while at face value, the GTX 1660 Super seems like an NVIDIA counter to AMD’s impending launch, outside of the AMD and NVIDIA testing labs, it’s remains to be seen where things end up.

The one thing that is clear, however, is that this may as well be a de facto price cut for NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. Set to be released at $50 less than NVIDIA’s fastest GTX 1660 card, the GTX 1660 Super is only the slightest bit slower than the GTX 1660 Ti, delivering around 96% of its performance – barely outside of our regular run-to-run variation. When NVIDIA went about cutting down the GTX 1660 Ti to create the original GTX 1660, the single biggest change there was swapping out GDDR6 for cheaper GDDR5. Now that they’ve effectively undone this – and then some – most of the performance that NVIDIA shaved off for the GTX 1660 has come back in the lower-priced Super card. As a result, while the GTX 1660 Super doesn’t offer anything in terms of performance that we haven’t seen before, it brings this level of Turing performance down to a lower price, and, NVIDIA hopes, something that’s more enticing to GTX 10 and 9-series owners who have been put-off by the relatively high prices of recent cards.
...

Continue Reading