MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ventus XS 6 GB Review

Name: MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ventus XS 6 GB
Brand: MSI

W1zzard

on Apr 9th, 2019,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: MSI

(16 Comments) »

Introduction

NVIDIA launched its GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card, doubling down on its idea of Turing-based GeForce GTX graphics cards that lack ray-tracing capabilities, but feature performance uplifts at normal raster graphics. At $280, the GTX 1660 Ti from last month ended up leagues ahead of the similarly priced and recently launched Radeon RX 590 and capable of playing any game at 1080p with details maxed out, and 1440p with a little tweaking. At its price point, though, the GTX 1660 Ti wasn't really a successor to the current mainstream market leader—the GTX 1060 6 GB—in terms of sheer sales. That distinction now goes to the GTX 1660.

At $220, the GTX 1660 is built to a cost, and NVIDIA has made sure it has ample headroom to cut costs further in the future if AMD comes out with competitive products in this segment, such as the fabled "Navi." It is carved out of the same 12 nm "TU116" silicon as the GTX 1660 Ti with fewer CUDA cores and slower 8 Gbps GDDR5 memory replacing 12 Gbps GDDR6. NVIDIA is hence looking to offer a product that is incrementally faster than the GTX 1060 6 GB and anything AMD has to offer in this segment, which can still deliver on Full HD gameplay with maximum quality.

As we detailed the "TU116" in our GTX 1660 Ti reviews, this silicon is derived from the "Turing" architecture by removing RT cores and tensor cores, leaving just the CUDA cores which have the same IPC and clock-speed uplifts as any other RTX 20-series card. The target audience for the GTX 1660 is that colossal mass of gamers into online multiplayer e-Sports titles and in need of just a card that can keep them ticking at Full HD, or perhaps even high refresh rates.

NVIDIA carved the GTX 1660 out of the "TU116" silicon by disabling 2 out of 24 streaming multiprocessors, resulting in a CUDA core count of 1,408 and 88 TMUs, which is still higher than what the "Pascal" based GTX 1060 6 GB packs. With 48 ROPs and a 192-bit GDDR5 memory bus driving 6 GB of memory, the rendering and memory subsystem is practically carried over.

Today, we are reviewing the MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ventus XS OC, which is the company's offering targeting NVIDIA's MSRP of $220, while still including an overclock out of the box and a backplate.

GeForce GTX 1660 Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Shader Units	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
GTX 1050	$140	640	32	1354 MHz	1455 MHz	1752 MHz	GP107	3300M	2 GB, GDDR5, 128-bit
GTX 1050 Ti	$180	768	32	1290 MHz	1392 MHz	1752 MHz	GP107	3300M	4 GB, GDDR5, 128-bit
RX 570	$130	2048	32	1168 MHz	1244 MHz	1750 MHz	Ellesmere	5700M	4 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RX 580	$170	2304	32	1257 MHz	1340 MHz	2000 MHz	Ellesmere	5700M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
GTX 1060 3 GB	$185	1152	48	1506 MHz	1708 MHz	2002 MHz	GP106	4400M	3 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
GTX 1060	$210	1280	48	1506 MHz	1708 MHz	2002 MHz	GP106	4400M	6 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
RX 590	$240	2304	32	1469 MHz	1545 MHz	2000 MHz	Polaris 30	5700M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
GTX 1660	$220	1408	48	1530 MHz	1785 MHz	2000 MHz	TU116	6600M	6 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
MSI GTX 1660 Ventus XS OC	$220	1408	48	1530 MHz	1830 MHz	2000 MHz	TU116	6600M	6 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
GTX 1070	$310	1920	64	1506 MHz	1683 MHz	2002 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RX Vega 56	$320	3584	64	1156 MHz	1471 MHz	800 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1660 Ti	$280	1536	48	1500 MHz	1770 MHz	1500 MHz	TU116	6600M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
GTX 1070 Ti	$450	2432	64	1607 MHz	1683 MHz	2000 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RTX 2060 FE	$350	1920	48	1365 MHz	1680 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit

Packaging and Contents

You will receive:

Graphics card
Driver disc
Documentation

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.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt-modders and those who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use them in your articles or forum posts.