Let us start with the large elephant in the room. This is a rather large card for any NVIDIA ’60 class card. In fact at 301mm x 132mm by 50mm (aka ‘2.5 slot’ width)… this is one of the largest NVIDIA GTX 1660Ti cards on the market. It is over-sized in length, width, and height. This is not a card meant for small form-factor builds. It is meant for big, beefy cases where you can really show-off your latest custom build. If your case is small it may simply not fit.
This is the downside to overclocking orientated cards. The upside is that this additional length, height, and width allows for silent operations at ‘factory’ frequencies and more overclocking headroom than you would expect from a ’60 class card. As an added bonus ASUS’ RoG design team took the time and effort to also make it a rather pretty card – if a bit monochromatic.
Let’s start with the aesthetics. Some ‘gaming’ or ‘overclocking’ cards take a “more is more” approach to styling with extreme color pallets, enough LEDs to cover a Christmas tree… and generally a ‘look at me I am so 1337!’ design philosophy. ASUS did not take that approach. Instead they use a multi-angular plastic top fascia with enough 16million color LEDs to add accents without being garish, a nice clean black color scheme, and rather understated RoG graphics on the backplate.
Equally impressive, the angular styling to the top fascia is not just there for looks, and rather helps focus air towards the three fans, and then helps diffuse it over the entire length of the heatsink. In a rather interesting move, these three fans are not what you would expect to find in this price range. In fact, ASUS’ Axial-tech fan design is not even used on some of their more expensive RTX 2060 cards. What Axial-tech boils down to is the fans are designed to move the air axially… or parallel to the fan hub.
Yes, in theory all ‘downdraft’ fans move air down and parallel to the fan’s motor hub, but in reality they blow downward’ish with a more cone shape airflow pattern. This lack of focus in standard fans means that they have lower static pressure and while cover a greater surface area… cannot push through a dense fin-array like axial fan’s can. This is why ASUS can claim 40 percent more static pressure (2.8mm) and 27% more airflow (40.11CFM per fan) compared to standard fan designs. The main way in which they can do all this is by connecting all the fan blades together at the outer edge (if you look closely the entire fan assembly is one solid chunk of plastic with the blades molded directly into the circular plastic). These additional bits of plastic between the blades act as air dams and any ‘waste’ air that would have flown off the ends of the blades, hits the dams, and then bounces downwards and into the fin array. Mix in highly advanced blade design and you get an Axial-Tech fan.
As an added bonus these small air dams also act as stiffeners so the chance of a catastrophic blade failure is greatly reduced. Beyond this added bonus, since they are moving air in a more focused and efficient manner, these fans also do not have to spin as fast as typical fans in order to keep temperatures check. Instead they are whisper quiet at stock ‘performance mode’ frequency levels… and all but silent when the card is in ‘quiet mode’. Of course, in ‘quiet mode’ the frequency overclock is lowered somewhat from 1890Mhz to 1860… but even this ‘quiet mode’ still represents a full 90Mhz over what NVIDIA reference specifications allow for.
To change from performance to quiet modes ASUS has included two BIOSs and a small dip switch. The default setting is for ‘P’ (for performance) and to make the card dead silent (and we mean dead silent… with the fans stop spinning while idle) slide to ‘Q’ for quiet mode. This hardware level adjustment is nice as it does not risk messing up a BIOS, and if by some quirk of the Fickle Finger of Fate you corrupt the P BIOS setting during overclocking… your card is not bricked as you have a backup BIOS.
Moving on. To take advantage of three fans the custom, the three double-length heatpipe based heatsink has three separate and distinct zones – or three fin arrays all connected to the same 3 heat pipes. By cutting the heatsink up static pressure requirements are further reduced, a certain amount of air is allowed to flow down and hit the secondary heat spreader (more on this in a moment), and does not require counter-rotating fans to reduce airflow turbulence (aka air flow from one fan ‘fighting’ with the flow from its neighbor).
Before we get to this secondary heat spreader – or what Asus calls a metal brace ‘stiffener’ – there is one last feature to this massive custom heatsink that needs to be mentioned. All good manufactures polish the base of the heatsink so as to improve heat transfer from the core to the heat spreader. ASUS, on the other hand, has taken this a step further and starts with much more precise machining process that does not require as much polishing and is upwards of 10 times flatter. ASUS claims this ‘MaxContact’ technology increase surface contact by a full 100 percent by simply having fewer pores in the base and thus less gaps that the TIM has to fill up. Even though they use good TIM, Thermal Interface Material is never as efficient as the metal itself at transferring heat away from the core. Needless to say this is a very, very important feature.
Once you remove the heatsink you will notice a large full-length metal bracket that not only covers nearly the entirety of the PCB but also wraps up and attaches to the rear I/O port bracket. This has been included for two reasons. The first is the obvious and main one: to stiffen this large and heavy card. Basically, this moderately thick chunk of alloy keeps the card from sagging as it ages (and thus reduces stress on the PCB). It also decreases stress on the motherboard’s PCIe slot – as it helps make the PC case itself bear more of the cards weight.
The other reason is self-evident once you remove it from the PCB and can see the heatpads. In a ‘waste not, want not’ design philosophy RoG’s engineers have turned this chunk of alloy into a large heat spreader. Since it is actively cooled, via the fans and cutouts in the fin array, this keeps the memory and part of the VRM subsystem cool as a cucumber… and further ensures stability even when the memory and core is further overclocked. This may not be the first time we have seen this tweak, Zotac and their AMP! series does it as well, but it is the hallmark of an over-engineered card. Just the way we like it.
This theme of over-building continues on to the power delivery subsystem. It is an all-digital 6+2 design with 6 phases for the TU116-400 core and two for the memory.
Drilling down a tad more ASUS’ Republic of Gamers design team specified Nichicon Black Metallic solid polymer Capacitors with an extended lifespan, SAP II POSCAP (tantalum-polymer solid capacitors) for noise and ripple suppression, premium alloy chokes, DrMOS ‘fets, all backstopped by two all-digital voltage regulation modules – a UPI uP9512R for the Core and a secondary for the memory (a UPI uP9024Q).
Taken as a whole this is what RoG engineers call their Super Alloy Power II technology and it offers a ton of clean, stable power for the core and memory. So much so it is a similar configuration used on much higher priced RTX models. Which does make some sense, or at least was probably how the engineers sold it to the bean counters, as this is not a 120 TDP card like most NVIDIA GTX 1660Ti’s. It is a 130 TDP card. That is how the engineers were able to guarantee such a nice factory overclock.
To provide more than enough power ASUS has included an 8-pin PCIe power connector port. This port all by itself can provide 150 watts (or a full 30 watts more than the entire TDP of the card). Add in the 75 watts that the card can call on from the PCIe x16 slot itself and this card has access to nearly twice the amount of power it needs – 93.8 percent more to be precise.
There is actually two more special features we need to discuss before moving on to the I/O ports. The first is the included ‘stealth mode’ button located on the card (that is thankfully labeled as LED On/Off… and is located right next to the BIOS dip switch selector). This physical button will over-ride the LED AURA settings… and turns them off. This is a nice feature for those looking for a card that will not illuminate your work area (for example at night when you do not want to disturb others in your household, or when using it in an HTPC where its lighting could interfere with your large screen television). Honestly, more cards should come with this feature as it allows buyers who want LEDs… to have them, and yet with a press of a button can be turned completely off for those who do not.
The other very nifty feature is the two 4-pin fan headers ASUS has included on the PCB. These two headers will override the built-in fan speed profile and allow an external controller to tweak the profile (or even create an entirely new one). For example, if you plug these two headers into your ASUS motherboard and run the Q-Fan application built into your boards BIOS you can create a highly sophisticated fan profile. For some this will be an overlooked feature, as the default fan speed profile is very good (and can be adjusted in the ASUS GPU TWEAK software)… but for those wanting to push the boundaries of sanity this feature can allow experienced overclockers the ability to get a semi-stable overclock… fully stable. Once again this is a feature few video cards come with, but we wish it was stock on all cards in this price range (and above).
About the only area that is reminiscent of a ‘stock’ NVIDIA GTX 1660Ti is in the I/O port options. In grand total you get two full sized HDMI 2.0b ports, and two full sized DisplayPort 1.4 ports. There is no DVI-D port included, which is a shame. It is understandable as DVI-D is getting rather long in the tooth, and few GTX 1660Ti’s support it, but this this is one area Republic of Gamers’ could have helped distinguish this impressive card from the rest.
Overall this is an extremely well-designed video card. It may not be perfect but it is close. It is a GPU that may be big, but it is not big because of lazy design. Instead, it is a big card because that is what was needed to ensure overclocking is never bottlenecked by temperatures or power stability. Quite honestly this over-building design philosophy easily helps justify its asking price… and would have even if it was as expensive as MSI’ flagship model. Color us impressed.
