The Card

MSI's GTX 1660 Ventus XS tries to minimize size to fit into all cases, but without compromising on cooling. A backplate is included, too. Dimensions of the card are 20.0 x 13.0 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard-sized 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 regardless of 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.


The GeForce GTX 1660 does not support SLI.

Disassembly

MSI's heatsink uses a single double-length heatpipe. This part of the cooler also cools the memory chips.


Once the main cooler is removed, we can see a small heatsink that's installed separately; it cools the voltage regulation circuitry.


The backplate is made out of plastic, which is quite an interesting cost optimization. Even a plastic backplate will protect the card against damage during handling and installation, and improves looks. In theory, a metal backplate can provide better cooling than a plastic one, but the differences are so small that it really doesn't make much of a difference, especially on an energy-efficient design like the GTX 1660.

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