Gigabyte GTX 1660 SUPER GAMING OC review (Page 27)

Gigabyte GTX 1660 SUPER GAMING OC review

Graphics cards 1048 Page 27 of 27 Published 2019-10-29 14:00 by Hilbert Hagedoorn

Conclusion

Final words and verdict

Gigabyte offers a nice product with the gaming OC edition of this 229 USD graphics card. Due to it being the faster SKU, we do expect a price premium of roughly 20 bucks though. Whether or not that is worth it to you is only for you to decide of course. With the GTX 1660 Series you do get up-to-snuff with the latest Turning architecture, just not tensor and RT cores. So in the 1920x1080 and maybe even 2560x1440 a good number of games will run fine, alongside improved power consumption. This 6 GB card offers the performance one can expect. The factory tweaked model is 4% faster over the reference values. Tweaking wise there's room left. We do think that all cards will match a roughly 10% OC bracket that, really, is by NVIDIA's design. As mentioned, the 6 GB of GDDR6 graphics memory at Full HD is sufficient.

Aesthetics

As stated the card does not come with much fancy RGB options, just a logo lit at the top side and then the sizable cooler makes this product look as to what it is, rather big. If you look at the photo above you can see some aluminum fins, it would be nice to have these colored in black. The triple fan cooler has nice dark aesthetics. The casing of the card including a backplate, it's all plastic though, please do keep that in mind. So overall the card is not hyper fancy, but an okay looking card.

Cooling & acoustic levels

The card tops out at roughly only 63 Degrees C while gaming. So that's not bad at all, the acoustics I'd rate as silent, we doubt you'll ever hear the card once mounted into a chassis. In idle the fans do not spin btw. We've heard no noticeable coil whine. But I do want to note that any graphics card at a high-enough FPS can make some coil whine.

Overclocking

Much like any NVIDIA product these days, we've been able to push roughly 10% extra perf out of the card compared to the reference card. The combination of memory, power and voltage settings will bring you a proper overclock. Once you've applied it, you get a few percents more perf. Here again, we expect all brands to roughly reach this kind of tweaking performance.

Concluding

The 1660 SUPER overall obviously is nice for the mainstream market but sits in a very narrow window between the two aforementioned cards. You'll see 1660 performance with let's call it 10% extra performance thanks to the memory type used. Any 1660 non-Ti, however, is clearly positioned against the competitions Radeon RX 590. The reality is also that most consumers have put RTX cards on hold due to the sales price of Raytracing range, which remains to be steep. The GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER addresses the issue of offering a more compelling product. Gigabyte offers one of the fastest SKUs with an 1860 MHz boost clock. However, clock frequencies matter less these days as the more important fact and register seem to become the power limiter. The amount of Wattage you allow a card to use will define it's performance. So you can set 2000 MHz even, but of course, the card would throttle based on that power setting. All tested AIB cards offer 3 to 4% additional performance seen over the reference values, ergo that is not a big difference. The card overclocks well though, but here again, the very same NVIDIA limiters kick in all cards reach that 8 to 10% domain of added performance over the reference design. Keep that in mind as these days you priobably should be looking at aesthetics, acoustics, temps, and price as dominating factors, as the rest is all based on that NVIDIA performance delta. The Gaming OC from Gigabyte certainly ticks the most right boxes. I do wish Gigabyte would step away from that all plastic design, including the closed plastic backplate. But performance, acoustics, temps and looks otherwise are all there.