Introduction

NVIDIA released the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER not long ago. It's a mid-range graphics card positioned between the GTX 1660 and the GTX 1660 Ti released earlier this year. The addition of the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER is necessitated by changes across the competitive landscape, specifically AMD's announcement of the Radeon RX 5500 series with which the competitiveness of the original GTX 1660 could buckle. The GTX 1660 SUPER is hence being launched at US$229, just $10 more than the GTX 1660 commanded at launch and $50 less than the GTX 1660 Ti.



The GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER has the same exact CUDA core count as the GTX 1660, at 1,408, and is based on the same 12 nm "TU116" silicon. GPU clock speeds are unchanged, too, with 1530 MHz core and 1785 MHz GPU Boost. The SUPER-charging of this SKU begins with its memory subsystem. The GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER gets 6 GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 14 Gbps, which is faster than even the 12 Gbps GDDR6 memory found on the GTX 1660 Ti and on par with that of the much pricier RTX 2060 in terms of memory bandwidth—336 GB/s, a massive 75 percent increase over the GTX 1660. With it, NVIDIA hopes to shore up performance by up to 20 percent without touching the CUDA core count and stepping on the toes of the GTX 1660 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 16-series exists to cater to the bulk of the sub-$300 market for solid FPS rates in games at 1080p, including the e-sports crowd. NVIDIA RTX hardware isn't available in this segment as the GPU would be too slow for real-time ray-tracing due to its size. DirectX Raytracing through software is available on all Turing cards, including GeForce GTX 16, but at lower performance than what the "RTX" cards offer. GTX 1660 also receives the other architectural improvements, such as "Turing" CUDA cores, which offer concurrent integer and floating point execution, adaptive shading, and a unified cache.

We have with us the EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER SC Ultra, the company's premium offering featuring an aluminium fin-stack heatsink with a direct-contact heatpipe base, twin fan ventilation, a single 8-pin PCIe power input, and a backplate. The card offers factory overclocked speeds of 1830 MHz GPU Boost. It's priced at $229, which means it offers a solid cooler, backplate, and overclock out of the box for no price increase over NVIDIA MSRP.

New GeForce Software Features

Alongside the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER, NVIDIA is releasing the GeForce Software Branch 440 WHQL drivers, which introduce three big feature additions to Turing (GTX 16-series and RTX 20-series). These include updates to NVIDIA Ultra-Low Latency (NULL) input latency enhancement, ReShade implementation in FreeStyle, and improved Image Sharpening.


NULL (NVIDIA Ultra-Low Latency) is an input latency enhancement that seeks to reduce the time it takes for your input to register as an action in your game. With the GeForce 440 drivers, NVIDIA is introducing NVIDIA G-SYNC support to NULL, which means you benefit from the anti-tearing and smooth motion characteristics of G-SYNC while retaining the advantages of low input latency.


NVIDIA's own input latency testing shows that V-Sync On + G-SYNC + NULL (green bar) now offers comparable input latency to a scenario where V-SYNC, NULL, and G-SYNC are all disabled (dark green bar). The latter gives you the best latency, but leaves you with screen tearing.

Conventional V-Sync without NULL or G-SYNC is the worst scenario as the machine faces the highest input latency. NVIDIA's changes now let you have G-SYNC at the same low-input latencies as V-Sync off, "nullifying" G-SYNC's impact on input latency.


ReShade is an extremely popular 3D graphics post-processing software that lets you dramatically alter or improve a 3D scene or an image by running the final output through custom shaders called filters (similar to the "filters" in your phone's camera). ReShade enjoys a vast community of users with custom filters. NVIDIA Freestyle achieves pretty much the same thing (shader replacement and post-processing), which had NVIDIA introduce support for ReShade filters not just to Freestyle, but Ansel, the in-game still-art tool.


Custom shaders can be used to cheat competitive games, so the new support comes with some restrictions. Competitive games will let you use the 14 original Freestyle filters and over 30 official ReShade filters, but no custom filters. For non-competitive games (think AAA games with a focus on SP), you can choose from a broader selection of official ReShade filters in addition to the Freestyle filters (over 70 of them), and use custom ReShade filters. Ansel is far less restricted because it has little to do with competitive gaming. You can use any custom ReShade filter on games that support the Ansel SDK: 70+ official ReShade filters and 16 original Ansel filters.


NVIDIA made improvements to its Image Sharpening feature that lets you restore some detail in your images and play with settings such as resolution-scale or texture quality to vastly improve your frame rates. With the R440 drivers, NVIDIA reduced the performance cost of Image Sharpening. It's also supported on DirectX 9, DirectX 11, and DirectX 12. Support for DirectX 11 is significant as it's still a very popular 3D graphics API and many modern games use it, and AMD's competing Radeon Image Sharpening (RIS) still doesn't support DirectX 11 at the time of writing. NVIDIA also added Image Sharpening toggles to their Control Panel, so you can toggle the feature globally or game-specifically without GeForce Experience.

Packaging and Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card

The Card

The EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER SC Ultra bears design resemblance to some of the company's premium cards based on the GTX 1660 Ti because the two are based on the same silicon with the same memory type.


Dimensions of the card are 20 cm x 11 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include DisplayPort 1.4a, HDMI 2.0b, and dual-link DVI-D. This DVI connector lacks analog pins; should you still have an analog VGA monitor, you'll have to buy an active DVI-to-VGA adapter.

NVIDIA has updated their display engine with the Turing microarchitecture, which now supports DisplayPort 1.4a with support for VESA's nearly lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC). Combined, this enables support for 8K@30Hz with a single cable or 8K@60Hz when DSC is turned on. For context, DisplayPort 1.4a is the latest version of the standard that was published in April, 2018.

At CES 2019, NVIDIA announced that all their graphics cards will now support VESA Adaptive Sync (aka FreeSync). While only a small number of FreeSync monitors have been fully qualified with G-SYNC, users can enable the feature in NVIDIA's control panel regardless of whether the monitor is certified or not.


The board uses one 8-pin power connector. This input configuration is specified for up to 225 watts of power draw.


GeForce GTX 1660 Super does not support SLI.

Disassembly

The cooler uses an aluminium fin-stack heatsink. A copper base plate makes contact with the GPU, and two flattened copper heat pipes spread heat across the heatsink. Thick thermal pads pull some heat from the memory chips. Two 90 mm fans ventilate the heatsink.


The metal backplate protects the card against damage during installation and handling.


Interesting design choice. Not only did EVGA use thermal pads as thick as pencil erasers, but they stacked two of these up near the main cluster of memory chips to reach between the two flattened heat pipes. Perhaps they did this to disperse retention force, rather than convey heat. Now, this thick thermal pad of course doesn't transfer heat from the memory chips to the heatsink all that well as a lot of heat will migrate through the BGA solder balls and into the PCB instead.