NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Mobile vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super (Desktop)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Mobile

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 is the second fastest Pascal based graphics card in mid May 2016. It comes in two variants, the desktop version (see here for the detail page) with 1920 shaders and the mobile variant with 2048 shaders and lower clock rates. Both cards are based on a cut down GP104 chip (like the GTX 1080) and are manufactured in 16 nm FinFET at TSMC.

Compared to the GTX1080, the GTX1070 features less CUDA cores (2048 versus 2560) that are clocked a bit lower (maximum Boost 1645 versus 1733). Instead of the new GDDR5X, the GTX 1070 uses slower GDDR5 graphics memory - but still 8 GB. The TDP is also reduced and rumored to be 10 Watts higher than the predecessor, the GTX 980M.

For thin and light laptops Nvidia offer a Max-Q called version of the GTX 1070 with lower TDP and also significantly lower performance. Sadly this variant im sold with the same GTX 1070 name, making it hard to judge the performance.

The performance depends on the cooling solution of the laptop. With a good fan system, the performance of the laptop version is on par with the desktop GTX 1070 (Founders Edition). Nvidia claims that partner solutions can be up to 10 percent slower however. In our benchmarks with various laptops the performance ranged from -5 to -14% slower performance compared to partner models of the GTX 1080 desktop models with slightly higher clocks.

On average the GTX 1070 is around 20 percent faster than the old mobile GeForce GTX 980 and therefore the second fastest mobile graphics card (non SLI). Therefore it is capable of WQHD and 4K gaming in high settings (see game benchmarks below).

The GP104 chip is manufactured in 16nm FinFET process at TSMC and offers a range of new features. DisplayPort 1.4 (ready), HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP), improved H.265 video en- and decoders (for PlayReady 3.0) are only some of the improvements. See our detailed Pascal architecture article for more details.

The power consumption of the GTX 1070 is specified with 115 Watt TGP according to Nvidia and therefore slightly above the old GeForce GTX 980M. This leads to rather big and clunky gaming laptops that use the GTX 1070. The later released Max-Q version of the GTX 1070 uses only 80 - 90 Watt TGP and is therefore better suited for thin and light laptops.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super (Desktop)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super is a powerful, mid-tier, Turing-based, desktop GPU. The GTX 1660 Super is based on the TU116 chip with 1,408 shader units, 48 ROPs, 88 TMUs and a 192-bit-wide memory bus (GDDR6 clocked at 7 GHz, effectively 14 GHz, bandwidth: up to 336 GB/s).

The TU116 chip and other Turing-based GPUs are produced using the 12-nm manufacturing process. However, the GeForce GTX 1660 does not offer the latest features such as DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and Real Time Ray Tracing. Nevertheless, there are some architectural improvements when it comes to floating point and integer performance. These operations can now be carried out simultaneously. Other notable features include Adaptive Shading, unified cache, DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) as well as H.265 encoding and decoding (PlayReady 3.0).

At Full HD resolution, the GeForce GTX 1660 Super performance lies between a GeForce GTX 1660 / GTX 1060 and a GTX 1660 Ti / 1070. Therefore, it is most suited for demanding games of 2019 in full HD resolution and maximum detail settings, or QHD at slightly reduced settings.

The energy consumption of the GeForce GTX 1660 Super amounts to 125 watts and therefore 5 Watt higher than the GTX 1060 or GTX 1660 Ti.