Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super

A good card to fill a narrow gap

- Jarred Walton

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Nvidia launched its new GTX 16-series with the GTX 1660 Ti, GTX 1660, and GTX 1650 seeking to join the ranks of the best graphics cards. The lack of ray-tracing hardware is interesting after last year’s RTX 20-series, but it makes sense for the mid-range and lower markets. When Nvidia refreshed the RTX lineup with the Super models, we didn’t expect to see that extend into the GTX range, yet here we are. The GTX 1660 Super now exists, leveraging the same Turing architecture and TU116 GPU.

We’re not saying the card is bad by any means, but it ends up overlapping the GTX 1660 Ti in many respects. It still has the GPU core counts and clock speeds of the GTX 1660, but it gets GDDR6 memory— which was one of the main differentiators between the 1660 and 1660 Ti. Even more curious, the GDDR6 memory is clocked at 14Gb/s, compared to the 12Gb/s speed on the 1660 Ti. Basically, it’s weird to have a lower-tier card that’s both better and worse than an existing higher-tier card. At least the price is lower.