Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 1660 Super graphics cards are priced just slightly higher than regular Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660s. They have been upgraded with GDDR6 memory to boost performance. In this review, we will look at Zotac’s take on the GTX 1660 Super to see how well it performs against the current competition.
Product Overview
GDDR6 boosts memory bandwidth available to the GPU
considerably. Standard GeForce GTX 1660 graphics cards have just 192GB/s of bandwidth, but the GeForce GTX 1660 Super has 336GB/s of bandwidth. This keeps the graphics processor better fed with data, which in turn is then able to perform better.
Zotac’s GeForce GTX 1660 Super Twin Fan graphics card comes with a dual-fan cooler that sits on an aluminum heatsink with liquid-filled heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU. This card also provides active cooling for the GDDR6 VRAM.
Zotac opted to not factory overclock this card, which means it operates at Nvidia’s suggested clock speed of 1,530MHz. The GeForce GTX 1660 Super Twin Fan’s boost clock is also unchanged at 1,785MHz.
Benchmarks
Our sister site PCMag received one of these graphics cards from Zotac and tested it against several other GPUs.
Testing against several other graphics cards showed that Zotac’s GeForce GTX 1660 Super Twin Fan graphics card came directly between the GeForce GTX 1660 and the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti in 3DMark’s Fire Strike Ultra test. This is also the case with 3DMark’s Time Spy test.
The GTX 1660 Super maintained a steady lead above the GTX 1660 in Unigine’s Superposition 1.0 test. It also handily outperformed the XFX Radeon RX 590 Fatboy, and overall it performed closer to the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti than the vanilla GTX 1660.
In real-world game tests, the GTX 1660 Super continued to perform well. At least for the most part; whereas the GTX 1660 Super showed sizable performance gains over the RX 590 and GTX 1660 in Far Cry 5, it’s performance in Shadow of the Tomb Raider was significantly lower. It actually returned the worst performance in this last test, but this appears to be due to poor driver optimization and not a fault of the card itself.
Conclusion
Overall, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1660 Super is a rather strange graphics card for Nvidia to introduce. Nvidia set the MSRP on the GTX 1660 Super GPU just $10 above the vanilla GTX 1660. Zotac’s model, featured in this review, is just $10 higher than that at $239.99. This removes almost any reason to buy the regular GTX 1660 as the GTX 1660 Super has shown to perform so much better.
At the same time, it’s harder to justify springing for the more expensive GTX 1660 Ti as the performance gap between it and the new GTX 1660 is relatively small. In general, if you are buying a graphics card for between $200 and $300, this is the one I’d recommend.
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