Intro

The ASUS DUAL GTX 1660 SUPER EVO OC arrives to take on the Red Devil RX 590 in this mega 46-game review

The GTX 1660 SUPER is the eighth GeForce GPU based on NVIDIA’s Turing architecture. Just as with the GTX 1660 Ti, there is no Founders Edition so it is represented in this review by the factory overclocked ASUS DUAL GTX 1660 SUPER EVO OC which launches for sale today at $229.99.

The three Turing 1660s are successors to the Pascal GTX 1060 and they are not equipped with RT nor Tensor cores which allows the GTX 1660 SUPER to launch starting at $229. The GTX 1660 SUPER is currently aimed at the RX 590 which can now be found below $200 with a single game bundle although most overclocked models are priced higher. The Red Devil RX 590 is a premium overclocked card that launched just under a year ago and is currently out of stock at Amazon and Newegg except for open box models priced just below $220, so this is still a fair comparison.

The GTX 1660 SUPER is NVIDIA’s very latest mainstream non-RTX Turing card and it will be available globally today starting at $229 and up for factory-overclocked cards. Performance-wise it will fit in-between the $229 GTX 1660 and the $279 GTX 1660 Ti. The GTX 1660 SUPER has launched at the same price as the vanilla GTX 1660 which will now see a price drop. Clearly NVIDIA is not positioning the new SUPER GTX 1660 against AMD’s current line-up, but is anticipating the upcoming RX 5500 XT and RX 5500. In fact, NVIDIA has announced that the GTX 1650 SUPER will launch on November 22 but has not yet set its pricing.

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With the release of the GTX 1660 SUPER, NVIDIA has included enhanced tools for image sharpening and scaling in the Control Panel, as well as integrating support for ReShade filters into the GeForce Experience. They have also improved and added an Ultra Low Latency Mode and even more G-SYNC compatible displays. We are covering this separately in a news post about the new 441.08 drivers.

Like the GTX 1060, the GTX 1660, the GTX 1660 Super, and the 1660 Ti each have 6GB of vRAM. We will highlight the GTX 1660 SUPER’s differences between these cards and we will focus on its performance. We will also benchmark it versus the $220 Red Devil RX 590 with an expanded 46-game benching suite which now includes The Outer Worlds, Borderlands 2, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to see how capable it is at Ultra settings at 1920×1080 and at 2560×1440. We especially want to see how the ASUS DUAL GTX 1660 SUPER EVO OC compares with the last generation Pascal EVGA GTX 1060 SC since NVIDIA claims that the GTX 1660 SUPER is up to 1.5X faster than the GTX 1060.

The GTX 1660, the GTX 1660 SUPER, and the GTX 1660 Ti are all based on the Turing TU116 GPU without tensor nor RT cores so they are less complex and less expensive than the RTX 2060. The GeForce GTX 1660s all feature the Turing core which allow them to exceed Pascal performance in games that use more complex shaders. TU116 includes support for Concurrent Floating Point and Integer Operations, a Unified Cache Architecture with a larger L1 cache, and Adaptive Shading.

The TDP of GTX 1660, SUPER and Ti are each only around 125 watts which make them an easy upgrade from a GTX 970 or GTX 960 as long as the PSU has an 8-pin power connector. Here is NVIDIA’s chart for comparison.

Here are the GTX 1660 SUPER’s specifications featuring 1408 CUDA cores, 88 Texture units, and 48 ROPs. Its base clock is 1530MHz but it will typically boost above 1785MHz. It is equipped with very fast 14Gbps vRAM at 7000MHz on a 192-bit interface.

The GTX 1660 Ti features 1536 CUDA Cores and a minimum GPU Boost clock of 1770 MHz as shown by NVIDIA’s chart below.

The GTX 1660 and the GTX 1660 SUPER each have 1408 CUDA cores, cut down from the GTX 1660 Ti’s 1536. While the GTX 1660 Ti uses 6GB of GDDR6, the GTX 1660 uses slower 6GB of GDDR5 memory with a 192-bit memory bus, for a combined memory bandwidth of 192GB/sec which is down considerably from the Ti’s 288.1GB/s and the SUPER’s 336GB/s. Base and Boost clocks are 1530MHz and 1785MHz, respectively which are just a notch up above the Ti’s clocks. The biggest difference between the vanilla GTX 1660 and the GTX 1660 SUPER is the SUPER’s much faster memory and thus much higher memory bandwidth.

Here are the GTX 1660 specifications from NVIDIA’s charts.

There are five ASUS GTX 1660 SUPER cards, and the card we are testing is in the middle of their stack. The ASUS DUAL GTX 1660 SUPER EVO OC is factory overclocked with a 30MHz offset over the stock core using the Gaming BIOS and 60MHz using the OC BIOS. It also has a Silent BIOS with an advanced onboard controller that brings fans to a stop when the GPU core temperature is below 55 C, letting gamers play undemanding games in relative silence. As the temperatures rise past a predetermined threshold, the fans automatically restart. All of these BIOSes may be accessed by using the ASUS Tweak II utility and further manual overclocking is also available.

The ASUS DUAL GTX 1660 SUPER EVO OC specifications are as below.

BTR received a DUAL GTX 1660 SUPER EVO OC review sample on an extended loan from ASUS last Tuesday, and we have put it through its paces. We tested all five of our cards with recent drivers on a clean installation of Windows 10 64-bit Home edition, using a Core i7-8700K with all six cores overclocked to 4.8 GHz, and 16GB of T-FORCE 3866MHz DDR4.

First, let’s unbox the ASUS DUAL GTX 1660 SUPER EVO OC.