Nvidia has today released the GTX 1660 Super, the best mainstream graphics card on the market today, outshining anything else in its price bracket and upsetting the supposedly superior GTX 1660 Ti. But Nvidia has also released the full details of the other GTX Turing card to get the Super suffix – the GTX 1650 Super.
Yes, Nvidia has definitely ditched the old GTX 1650 Ti moniker that it originally looked like the card was going to come a-rocking, but the GTX 1650 Super also bears almost no relation to its GTX 1650 sibling either. That’s no bad thing, because we’re actually looking at a card that’s more like a GTX 1660 Lite than anything else… but adding in another name into the Super/Ti mix would just be a recipe for marketing nightmares.
Launching on November 22 this year, the GTX 1650 Super will appear priced somewhere between the GTX 1650 and the GTX 1660. But that could put it anywhere between $150 and $200, but you can bet you won’t see final pricing for the card until a certain AMD RX 5500 breaks cover.
That’s exactly a month later than the initial rumours had suggested the card would arrive, and could potentially have either been some confusion among the leakers, or else Nvidia decided to hold back the GTX 1650 Super having seen where AMD was targeting the RX 5500-series cards.
Whatever the reasons, we’ve got the full specs breakdown of the GTX 1650 Super, and it’s sporting the same TU116 GPU as the GTX 1660-series cards rather than the limited TU117 chip of the OG GTX 1650. Another interesting data point in the specs sheet for the new card is the fact that it’s using GDDR6 of the 12Gbps variety.
| GTX 1650 Super | GTX 1650 | GTX 1660 | |
| GPU | TU116 | TU117 | TU116 |
| CUDA cores | 1,280 | 896 | 1,408 |
| Boost clock | 1,725MHz | 1,665MHz | 1,785MHz |
| Memory | 4GB GDDR6 | 4GB GDDR5 | 6GB GDDR5 |
| Memory speed | 12Gbps | 8Gbps | 8Gbps |
| Memory bandwidth | 192GB/s | 128GB/s | 192GB/s |
| Transistors | 6.6bn | 4.7bn | 6.6bn |
| Die size | 284mm2 | 200mm2 | 284mm2 |
| TDP | 100W | 75W | 120W |
The original GTX 1650 used 8Gbps GDDR5 memory, like the GTX 1660 before it and we’ve now seen what sort of difference having the speedier video memory seems to make to the Turing architecture. The new GTX 1660 Super has the exact same core configuration as the straight GTX 1660, but the improved memory subsystem gives it between 10 – 20% higher frame rates.
In fact, quite often it matches the GTX 1660 Ti despite having fewer GPU cores…
Which makes me think that the GTX 1650 Super could cause some serious problems for the standard GTX 1660 card. Nvidia might even have to retire it. The new Super has 20 SMs, two fewer than the GTX 1660, but as we’ve seen higher speed memory seems to make a lot more difference than those 128 errant CUDA cores.
The GTX 1650 Super is clocked a little slower, has a couple of GBs less memory, but the fact that it is far quicker could make up for the shortfall. It’s going to make for an interesting budget gaming GPU when the GTX 1650 Super does finally launch in November, potentially taking on both the AMD RX 5500 and castrating the GTX 1660.