Nvidia launches £210 GTX 1660 Super with 14Gbps GDDR6

Nvidia has announced two new additions to its GeForce GTX product range, the GTX 1660 Super, which launches today for $229/£210, and the GTX 1650 Super, which will launch on November 22nd, with pricing there still to be confirmed.

Starting with today’s launch, the GTX 1660 Super comes with one key difference compared to the original GTX 1660: a swap from GDDR5 to GDDR6 for its 6GB of VRAM, which enables a 75 percent higher memory speed (14Gbps versus 8Gbps) and thus the same increase in raw memory bandwidth. Here’s how it (and the GTX 1650 Super) sit in the product stack:

What this leads to is a card that is nominally below the GTX 1660 Ti but which ships with marginally higher core clock speeds, a higher memory clock speed, more memory bandwidth, and slightly increased power consumption. The GTX 1660 Ti still has two additional SMs enabled in its implementation of the TU116 GPU for ~9 percent additional throughput, but it seems likely the GTX 1660 Super will be biting at the heels of the GTX 1660 Ti. Nvidia reckons the new card is up to 1.2x faster than the GTX 1660 and up to 1.5x as fast as the older GTX 1060 6GB – take these figures with a pinch of salt until we’re able to complete our review.

The GTX 1650 Super, meanwhile, is a more significant leap up in specs compared to the GTX 1650. For one thing, it moves from the smaller TU117 GPU to TU116, making it the fourth card using this GPU in the current stack. The SM count increases from 14 to 20, bringing about a 43 percent increase in CUDA cores and texture units, and clock speeds also get a bump. Like the GTX 1660 Super, it also gets an upgrade to GDDR6 memory, though this is still capped at 4GB running across a 128-bit bus. With a 12Gbps data rate Nvidia achieves a 192GB/s memory bandwidth throughput. These increases in cores and clocks result in a 25W increase in TDP, meaning a six-pin PCIe power plug is now a necessity.

The GTX 1660 Super launches today with a starting MSRP of $229 excluding tax in the US and £210 including VAT here. Nvidia claims that the original GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660 will continue to be a part of the stack, but this pricing puts it much closer to the GTX 1660 than GTX 1660 Ti, which start at £200 and £260 respectively at the time of writing, so the sustainability of these products is immediately called into question, at least at those prices. Nvidia is not producing any reference cards, so you can expect the usual variety in pricing from the board partners. It also looks like Nvidia will be applying pressure to AMD’s RX 590, which is the current closest offering in price starting at around £180 at the time of writing.

The GTX 1650 Super will launch in a similar fashion (no reference card) on November 22nd. Nvidia is yet to announce pricing, as it is likely waiting to see how the market reacts to the presence of the GTX 1660 Super and the upcoming Radeon RX 5500 from AMD, pricing for which is also still TBC.