The Card

The ASUS card follows the theme set by their previous GeForce 20 cards. A backplate is included, too. Dimensions of the card are 30.0 x 13.0 cm.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include two standard-size DisplayPort 1.4a and two 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.


The GeForce GTX 1660 does not support SLI. Instead, ASUS used that area to place some additional features. The first (from the left) is the dual-BIOS switch that toggles between the default "performance" BIOS and "quiet" BIOS which comes with a more relaxed fan curve and includes idle-fan-stop, too. Moving further to the right, we see a big button used to turn off the RGB illumination of the card completely (until next reboot). The solder pads further to the right are used for voltage measurement and tweaking.


Unfortunately, ASUS didn't label these points, probably to ensure they won't get into trouble with NVIDIA.


In addition to that, a bunch of nicely labeled solder pads were added to measure various voltages directly.


You also get two 4-pin PWM fan headers to sync your case fan to the graphics card's fans and an addressable RGB header to connect other RGB components.

Disassembly

The large ASUS heatsink uses three double-length heatpipes to keep the card cool.


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.

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