Detailed review of ZOTAC GTX 1660 Super AMP

NVIDIA has intensified the mid-range competition today with the launch of an additional GPU in the form of NVIDIA GTX 1660 Super and another, NVIDIA GTX 1650 Super, will be launched after November. Both cards have apparently moderate performance barriers to the GTX 16-Series (i.e. without hardware accelerated re-tracing but later supported by driver updates). Both cards are AIB only, meaning you won’t see any NVIDIA Founders Edition graphics cards for them. Today’s review is courtesy of ZOTAC GTX 1660 Super AMP Edition Card which is going to be retailed at Rs. 22,590 / – in India.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super Specification

The specifications of the GTX 1660 Super are the same as the GTX 1660, with only one major difference, the memory is bumped from GDDR5 to GDDR6 and with it increased bandwidth which will help in high resolution gaming.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super Specification
Card	RTX 2060 FE	GTX 1660 Ti	GTX 1660 Super	GTX 1660
Architecture	Turing	Turing	Turing	Turing
GPU	TU106	TU116-400	TU116-300	TU116-300
Chuda color	1920	1536	1408	1408
ROPs	48	48	48	48
Core clock	1365 MHz	1500 MHz	1530 MHz	1530 MHz
Boost watch	1680 MHz	1770 MHz	1785 MHz	1785 MHz
Memory clock	14 Gbps	12 Gbps	14 Gbps	8 Gbps
Memory type	GDDR6	GDDR6	GDDR6	GDDR5
Memory bus width	192-bit	288-bit	192-bit	192-bit
VRAM	6 GB	6 GB	6 GB	6 GB
Single precision perf.	6.5 TFLPS	4.6 TFLOPs	7.9 TFLOPS	4.3 TFLOPS
“RTX-OPS”	37	N / A	N / A	N / A
SLI support	No.	No.	No.	No.
Transistor count	10.8B	6.6B	6.6B	6.6B
Method of making	TSMC 12nm “FFN”	TSMC 12nm “FFN”	TSMC 12nm “FFN”	TSMC 12nm “FFN”
TDP	160W	120W	125W	120W
Launch price	$ 349	279	$ 229	$ 219

ZOTAC GTX 1660 Super AMP. As its name implies, a factory overclock comes which puts the boost clock at 1845 MHz which is 60 MHz from the boost frequency of the reference specification.

ZOTAC GTX 1660 Super AMP version graphics card

Since we have no idea what the reference design looks like, we can’t say exactly how much ZOTAC has changed in this particular graphics card. However, with the AMP version card, ZOTAC makes several changes to the overall design.

The card comes with a backplate that is pierced to provide a little extra rigidity around the edges. You will see the ZOTAC gaming logo on the top with GeForce GTX branding. Although only 125W is required for reference design, the card uses an 8-pin power connector, which means that the card can pull about 150 W or more from the PCIe connector. Or it could simply be a design choice to reduce the load per cable.

Below you can see three hotpipes entering the finstack that interact with the GPU, memory chips and MOSFET.

After removing the cooler assembly, we can see how much of the card is occupied by the PCB. On the right is a good inch and a half extra space which is used to accommodate the cool assembly. Also, the connector is quite disconnected at the top. Despite this deep respite, we did not encounter any problems to plug or unplug the card. This may look better if you use custom cables as the connector will be hidden from view.

Here we see the cool assembly in all its glory. These are two 90mm fans sitting on top of a thick finstack and scattering heat from three heatpipe GPU and VRM.

Below the cooler assembly, you can see that it has a copper base plate that communicates with the GPU and the heatpipes are spread across the heat sink.

Lastly, the graphics card has a GPU in the center which can be NVIDIA Turing TU116-300-A1 surrounded by eight micron MT61K256M32JE-14 chip for VRAM.

Performance

The specifications of the GTX 1660 Super are similar to those of the GTX 1660, except for changes in memory configuration, it will be interesting to see how it panes across the difference resolution. Unfortunately, we don’t have the number of the Vanilla GTX 1660, so we can’t say how much difference that GPU will have, but we do have a GTX 1650 and a 1660 Ti for comparison. Let’s take a look at some gaming benchmarks.

The new GTX 1660 Super remains the 1650 but the more interesting thing is that the GTX 1660 Super is equal to the GTX 1660 Ti in most benchmarks. Some titles of the 1660 Ti have the slight advantage of saying 3-5 FPS but it is not enough to justify the price difference. Looks like we don’t need to get 1660 Ti for most of the games we tested.