The Card

MSI's card follows the theme set by their previous GeForce 20 cards. This is the same cooler as on the MSI GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X. A backplate is included, too. Dimensions of the card are 25.0 x 13.0 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and one HDMI 2.0b.

NVIDIA has updated their display engine with the Turing microarchitecture, which now supports DisplayPort 1.4a with support for VESA's nearly lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC). Combined, this enables support for 8K@30Hz with a single cable, or 8K@60Hz when DSC is turned on. For context, DisplayPort 1.4a is the latest version of the standard that was published in April, 2018.

At CES 2019, NVIDIA announced that all their graphics cards will now support VESA Adaptive Sync (aka FreeSync). While only a small number of FreeSync monitors have been fully qualified for G-SYNC, users can enable the feature in NVIDIA's control panel, no matter whether the monitor is certified or not.


The board uses a single 8-pin power connector. This input configuration is specified for up to 225 watts of power draw.


GeForce GTX 1660 does not support SLI.

Disassembly

MSI's large heatsink uses three heatpipes to move heat away from the GPU chip.


Once the main cooler is removed, a black die-cast baseplate becomes visible. It covers most of the card and provides cooling for memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. Note how the backplate wraps around a bit, which improves looks while providing some additional stability through the black foam spacers.

On the next page, we dive deep into the PCB layout and VRM configuration.