EVGA GTX 1660 SUPER SC Ultra Review

The EVGA 1660 SUPER SC Ultra ships in a compact black box, with a cut-off image of the graphics card – along with some GeForce branding – visible on the front.

Inside, the only included accessory is an installation guide.

As for the card itself, the SC Ultra has a matte grey plastic shroud surrounding two black 90mm fans. I don't mind the overall look of the shroud, with the holes cut into it, but I'm not so keen on the shade of grey used, but of course that is personal preference. Despite being made from plastic, the shroud itself does feel surprisingly study so I have no complaints there.

We already mentioned that this is a small card, and its full dimensions are 202.1mm x 111.15mm, while it's also a standard dual-slot thickness. That makes it 35mm shorter than Palit's GamingPro OC, so it really should fit in pretty much any case on the market.

The front side of the shroud is home to the EVGA and GeForce GTX branding, but these don't light up as there is actually no RGB lighting anywhere on the card.

We can also get a look at the full-length metal backplate that has been fitted to the back of the PCB, which is a definite plus for this SC Ultra. Both 1660 SUPERs we reviewed for launch day used plastic backplates, and some other models don't have a backplate at all, so a metal backplate is a very good inclusion on EVGA's part.

Power requirements are standard with 1x 8-pin, while EVGA has outfitted this card with 1x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI and 1x DVI connectors.

Opening up the card is just a case of removing the four screws around the GPU core, and the PCB pulls away from the heatsink. EVGA is using a 3+2 VRM solution here, and there are some thick thermal pads on top of the memory modules which are even double-stacked in one area. Pulling those off, we can see the chips are from Micron, labelled ‘9PA77D9WCW'. The TU116-300-A1 GPU is unchanged from the vanilla GTX 1660.

Now, as for the heatsink, this uses a single fin stack with a copper contact plate to transfer heat from the GPU, and this sits above two 10mm copper heatpipes. Interestingly, there's nothing contacting the VRM so it seems cooling for the MOSFETs etc is purely from airflow. The memory, however, contacts with the fin stack and one section of the copper heatpipe via its thick thermal pads.

We reached out to EVGA about the decision not to include dedicated VRM cooling with the SC Ultra, and received the following response: ‘For this card the VRM is able to stay in spec without any direct cooling on it as it is a lower wattage card'. Taking EVGA at their word that is fair enough (I don't have any means of validating the claims made) but at the very least it does feel like a cost-cutting measure from EVGA – the Palit GamingPro OC is actually cheaper than this card yet still has contact cooling for the VRM, so this is a definite negative point for the SC Ultra.

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