The Card

The MSI GTX 1660 SUPER Gaming X features an upscale-looking design that's a class above. Premium bits of metal and plastic are used on both sides.


Dimensions of the card are 24.5 cm x 13.0 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and an 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 with G-SYNC, users can enable the feature in NVIDIA's control panel regardless of whether the monitor is certified or not.


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


The GeForce GTX 1660 Super does not support SLI.

Disassembly

The MSI Twin Frozr VII cooler used with this card features a dense aluminium fin stack to which heat is pulled through a nickel-plated copper base plate and spread across the fin stack by three heat pipes that are bent in an "S" shape for two passes through the fin-stack, each. The heatsink is ventilated by a pair of 90 mm fans.


Once the main heatsink is removed, a black baseplate becomes visible; it provides cooling for the VRM circuitry and memory chips.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.

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