Inno3D GTX 1660 SUPER Twin X2 Review

The GTX 16 Series is treated to the SUPER amplification. Is the presence of the GTX 1660 SUPER necessary? We investigate via the Inno3D GTX 1660 SUPER Twin X2 graphics card.

Product on Review: GTX 1660 SUPER Twin X2
Manufacturer & Sponsor: INNO3D
Street Price: £209 GBP – $229 USD

As we approach the end of the year, it is some 7 months since we saw NVIDIA unveil their new GTX 16 Series – a range of GPUs based on 12nm Turing architecture with a focus on delivering capable 1080p performance. Well, today marks the addition of another SKU under the GTX 16 series and this time it bears the renowned SUPER classification.

The GTX 1660 SUPER is a go between for the GTX 1660 and the GTX 1660 Ti. On paper this new graphics card could almost be an identical model, bearing the same TU116 GPU, Cuda Core count, GPU clock speeds and other characteristics. The significant adjustment has been made to the memory architecture which now utilises GDDR6, allowing for a substantial performance increase.

Since there are no reference/founders edition versions of the GTX 1660 SUPER, we’ll be examining the Inno3D GTX 1660 SUPER Twin X2 today which comes in at the base MSRP. Is it worth consideration? Let’s find out!

About Inno3D

InnoVISION Multimedia Limited is a pioneering developer and manufacturer of a diverse range of cutting-edge multimedia PC hardware products established in 1998 Hong Kong. Our manufacturing operations have been set up since 1990 in Shenzhen, China. In this short period of time we focus on manufacturing OEM/ODM products as well as contracting out extensive production and research facilities to specialist companies. We have accomplished international recognition by PC’s top reviewers as becoming an outstanding success and one of the most fast growing companies in Asia.

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications surrounding GTX 1660 SUPER supplied directly by Inno3D:

GPU
GTX 1660 SUPER (TU116)
Stream Processor
1536
Video Memory
6GB GDDR6
Memory Bus
192-bit
Engine Clock
1500MHz
Engine Clock Boost
1785MHz
Memory Clock
14000MHz Effective
PCI Express
3.0
Display Outputs
3x DisplayPort 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
Recommended Power Supply
500W
DirectX
12 API feature level 12_1
OpenGL
4.5
Cooling
Dual-Fan
Slot Size
2
Supported OS
Windows 10
Card Length
215 x 110 x 43 mm

Closer Look Video

For this review we’ve produced a video of INNO3D GTX 1660 SUPER Twin X2. In this video we go into great detail about this graphics card, walking you through all of the features and detaching the cooler for a look at the thermal solution and innards. View the video here or watch below:

Test Setup & Methodology

HOW WE TEST GRAPHICS CARDS

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

HARDWARE

Taking Intel’s High-End Desktop platform, our hardware utilises the Intel X99 chipset. Combined with this we use the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic and achievable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of DDR4 at 2666MHz and a 750GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

Graphics Cards on test:
INNO3D GTX 1660 SUPER Twin X2
ASUS GTX 1660 Ti
NVIDIA GTX 1070
NVIDIA GTX 1060
NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti
NVIDIA GTX 1050
AMD RX 590
AMD RX 580
AMD RX 570

Special thanks go to Avermedia, Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:

Motherboard: MSI X99A Workstation
CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition @ 4GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair LPX Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 2666MHz 16-17-17-35 C1
Power Supply – CORSAIR HX1050
Hard Drive – Samsung 840 EVO 750GB
Cooler – CORSAIR Hydro Series™ H150i Pro 360mm Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Monitor – AOC 28″ 4K U2879VF
Capture Card – Avermedia Live Gamer Extreme 2

BENCHMARKS

If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we’ve chosen:

Fortnite
Middle Earth: Shadow of War
Apex Legends
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
F1 2018
Battlefield V

To capture framerates we use a combination of in-game benchmark tools and FRAPS.

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included three of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

3DMark Time Spy
3DMark FireStrike
Unigine: SuperPosition
Unigine: Heaven 4.0

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Power, Temperatures, Acoustics

To test for power consumption, we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Heaven 4.0 which was ran for 20 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.

TEMPERATURE

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests we set Heaven 4.0 running continuously for ~30 minutes recorded the peak/maximum GPU temperature.

ACOUSTICS

Twin X2 is considerably loud under load. The fan curve cam hit 67% (2400 RPM) – a figure which is significantly higher than other cards.

DX12: 3DMark Time Spy

Download your copy now

With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, 3DMark Time Spy is the ideal benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards.

DX11: 3DMark FireStrike

Download your copy now

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is UL’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

DX11: Unigine Heaven 4.0

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

DX11: Unigine SuperPosition

Superposition is a new-generation benchmark tailored for testing reliability and performance of the latest GPUs. Top-notch visuals, support for VR-devices and an interactive mode with mini-games — the list of features built into Superposition could go on and on.

DX11: Fortnite

Fortnite Battle Royale is the FREE 100-player PvP mode in Fortnite. One giant map. A battle bus. Fortnite building skills and destructible environments combined with intense PvP combat. The last one standing wins.

DX11: Middle Earth: Shadow of War

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is an action role-playing video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It is the sequel to 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.

DX11: Apex Legends

Apex Legends is a free-to-play battle royale game developed by Respawn Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts. Set in the same universe as Titanfall, the game was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on February 4, 2019.

DX12: Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game developed by Eidos Montréal in conjunction with Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix. It continues the narrative from the 2013 game Tomb Raider and its sequel Rise of the Tomb Raider, and is the twelfth mainline entry in the Tomb Raider series.

DX11: F1 2018

F1 2018 is a racing video game and the tenth instalment in the Formula One video game franchise developed and published by Codemasters. The game is based on the 2018 Formula One World Championship and includes all twenty-one circuits from the calendar and all twenty drivers and ten teams competing in the season.

DX11: Battlefield V

Battlefield V is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA DICE and published by Electronic Arts. Battlefield V is the sixteenth installment in the Battlefield series.

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Value For Money

We make a simple calculation for this set of results. For each game we add all of the resulting FPS totals together and then divide by the four sets to give us an overall performance figure. While the figures alone do not give you an accurate picture of how the card will perform in any given scenario, they do tell you, when averaged, which GPU is the more capable across all of the benchmarks and settings tested.

Please note: we’ve used GBP for currency but since this is relative – regardless of which currency you use, this will give you a good indication of value for money.

Conclusion

The arrival of SUPER for the GTX 16 series may come as a surprise but this release is likely to pre-empt the launch of AMD’s RX 5500, which should be due any time soon.

The GTX 1660 SUPER slots right between the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti – both cards will not be decommissioned but will live on. As far as performance goes, this new SUPER variant offers 10-15% performance increase over the standard 1660 and will be a confident replacement for the now aging GTX 1060 6GB. It’s widely known that AMD’s RX 590 and the GTX 1060 were the perfect match for rivalry but this new GPU offers up a clear advantage in NVIDIA’s favour, the 590 is nowhere to be seen in most cases.

Under the hood, NVIDIA has done little to modify the makeup of SUPER but have rather amplified existing technology. GTX 1660 SUPER features the same GPU clock speed as the GTX 1660 but the memory has been upgraded from GDDR5 to GDDR6, offering higher bandwidth and greater frequency – bumping up to 14000MHz from 8000MHz. So, it is the memory that is responsible for the shift in performance.

This Inno3D variant of the GTX 1660 SUPER is a nice looking graphics card that does an admirable job at a respectable pricepoint of £209 GBP – $229 USD.

Thermal performance is reasonable, but sound sensitive gamers could find a problem. Out of the box, this graphics card is loud – reaching 67% fan speed (2400RPM) on auto. The fan curve needs some obvious adjustment to alleviate this issue. Also, we encountered micro stutters when the graphics card is in its idle state and zero-decibel mode is active. This is something we reported under the Inno3D GTX 1660 Twin X2 and it’s disappointing to see that Inno3D hasn’t fixed this.

The GTX 1660 SUPER offers great value for money for 1080p gamers who want 60 FPS with all the eye candy enabled. It’ll be interesting to see whether AMD can provide a suitable contender in this space!

Pros
+ Easy on the eye
+ Decent thermal performance
+ Excellent 1080p performance
+ Ideal for small, compact systems
+ Zero decibel fan tech.
+ Reasonably priced

Cons
– Noisy cooler (reaches 2400RPM under auto)
– Fans suffer micro stutter

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