GALAX GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER 1-Click OC Review

NVIDIA has officially announced its latest addition to its GeForce GTX 16 series today, the GTX 1660 SUPER. The GTX 1660 SUPER features the same TU116-300-A1 as the GTX 1660, but with a boost of GDDR6 memory, higher bandwidth at 336 GB/s and 14 Gbps effective memory speed.

Since there will be no reference card for the GTX 1660 SUPER, we will be taking a look at the GALAX GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER 1-Click OC for today’s review. Let’s see if the GTX 1660 SUPER will fill in the gap in between the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti, or will it be the GTX 1660 Ti slayer.

Specifications

The GALAX GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER 1-CLICK OC

At first glance, the GALAX GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER 1-CLICK OC here features the same design as the GALAX GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 1-CLICK OC which was launched earlier this year. Just in case if you wonder why we skipped the unboxing, it’s because our unit here doesn’t come with its retail packaging. Though the content of the box will probably be the same as the GALAX 1-CLICK OC series cards that fall in the same or if not, similar range.

While the cooling fans might look the same as the GTX 1660 Ti 1-CLICK OC, how the cooling fans on this GTX 1660 SUPER 1-CLICK OC behave is somewhat interesting. Unlike some of the designs that we’ve seen in the past, the fan on the right will continue to spin regardless of the load but the fan on the left will only start spinning once the GPU temperature hits 58°C above. It’s something that we would call it a ‘hybrid’ design – if that is the right word to describe it.

Underneath the cooler shroud, you’ll find the Aluminum block heatsink with two heatpipes that runs through the fins on the block to improve the cooling performance. It’s definitely not a fancy cooler as compared to the ones you’ll find on a high-end graphics card, but it’ll be sufficient enough for the GTX 1660 SUPER that has a rated TDP of 125W.

For the GTX 1660 SUPER, it comes with an 8-pin PCIe power connector and NVIDIA recommends a power supply that has at least 450W power.

Having a metal backplate has become a pretty common addon for graphics cards nowadays, and that’s the GTX 1660 SUPER 1-CLICK OC too, comes equipped with one. It features the same metal backplate as the one on the GTX 1660 Ti 1-CLICK OC, a pretty acceptable one we’d say.

Based on our previous experience, the metal backplate does get pretty hot to the touch after long hours of stress tests – the warning on the hot surface is there for a very good reason. The array of holes serves as the ventilation to prevent heat from getting trapped in between the back of the PCB and the metal backplate.

As for the display output, the GTX 1660 SUPER 1-CLICK OC comes with a DisplayPort, an HDMI, and a DVI-D.

Test System Setup

The test is done using the following setup under an ambient temperature of 30°C:

The test is done separately for games that support both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 at the resolution of 1920×1080, 2560×1440, and 3840×2160. The GTX 1660 Ti is used for this test as well, for performance comparison of course.

Games Benchmark – 1080p

At 1080p, the GTX 1660 SUPER 1-CLICK OC pretty much outperformed the GTX 1660 Ti by quite a margin on a number of the selected titles. Before the test, we’re expecting it to perform somewhere around the GTX 1660 Ti but it turns out that it actually performs much better than what we’ve initially expected.

Games Benchmark – 1440p

Moving on to 1440p, most of the selected titles are proven to be quite taxing for a card that is aimed for 1080p gaming. We can see that the GTX 1660 Ti started to struggle to maintain the 60fps mark on quite a number of the selected titles, while the GTX 1660 SUPER 1-CLICK OC seems to be still doing quite okay at this point.

Games Benchmark – 4K

The result for the 4K benchmark is probably that only one that is not too far away from our expectations. Based on the numbers, it’s pretty obvious that 4K gaming is a bit too much for both the GTX 1660 SUPER 1-CLICK OC and GTX 1660 Ti to handle.

Temperature

At room temperature of 30°C, the idle temperature of the GTX 1660 SUPER after running a number of tests is at 43°C. Though that’s with one of the fans spinning continuously regardless of the load on the GPU. We’ve temporarily removed the fan cable just to see what kind of temperature will we get if both fans aren’t spinning at all during idle and to our surprise, 45°C is the temperature that we get from the quick test. That’s not too far away from the default settings.

As for the load temperature, the highest temperature record on both game benchmark and FurMark stress test is 75°C, not too bad. It’s pretty understandable for this result, as Aluminum block heatsink will not be as efficient as the higher-end heatsink that has more Copper heatpipes and thin Aluminum fins to dissipate heat faster.

Final Thoughts

Judging from the benchmark results above, we can see that the GTX 1660 SUPER 1-CLICK OC is still a product that is aimed for 1080p gaming just like both the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti. We wouldn’t recommend it for anything above that even though it can definitely handle some of the titles on 1440p but only limited to a number of titles if you wish to play these games at very high graphics settings. One thing for sure is that it can definitely beat a GTX 1660 Ti, but quite a margin as well on quite a number of titles in our list.

The cooler isn’t the fanciest one around, but it’s simple enough and can definitely get the job done albeit the load temperature might seem to be a bit high to some users. The idle temperature of 43°C and load temperature 75°C is somewhat acceptable but the ‘hybrid’ or half spinning fan does make it looks weird as if one of the fans isn’t working as intended.

At the price of RM 1089, the GTX 1660 SUPER 1-CLICK OC is like RM 100 cheaper than the GTX 1660 Ti 1-CLICK OC and not to mention that it performs almost on par with the latter. That’s a pretty good deal, to be honest, and we’d definitely recommend it to gamers who are looking forward to upgrading their 1080p game but with a tight budget.

Pros

• Decent performance right out of the box
• Uses GDDR6 memory
• Offers higher effective memory speed than both GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti
• Offers higher bandwidth than both GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti
• Performance is close to a GTX 1660 Ti
• Reasonably priced

Cons

• Oddly designed cooling solution
• Load temperature is slightly on the higher side
• No support for SLI / NVLink