AMD’s launch of the RX 480 immediately prompted NVIDIA to release a high performance budget card, the GTX 1060, which was announced within a month after the release of the RX 480, as direct competition. Today we review the Founder’s Edition of the GTX 1060 and find out whether it delivers on what it promises.
As you can notice, the GTX 1060 looks a lot like its other 10-series counterparts, with the same triangle design on the cooler shell, and the nickel alloy based cooler shroud. The top side of the card has a green LED GeForce GTX display which can be controlled with the Geforce Experience software and the card has 1060 displayed in chrome. The card comes with 1,280 shader cores, and 3 or 6 GB of GDDR5 memory, which makes it a rather nice product and decent succesor to the GeForce GTX 970. It has a base clock frequency of 1,506 MHz and a boost clock frequency of 1,708 MHz.
The card comes with the standard vapour chamber cooling, and a 6-pin power connector. Like its AMD rival, the GTX 1060 also lacks a backplate, and the views on this can be regarded as mix. While it offers protection to the PCB elements, the backplate can also trap heat and thus affect cooling. The GTX 1060 offers five display connectors; one DVI port, one full size HDMI port and three DisplayPort connectors.
Let’s jump to the numbers. Talking about the temperatures, the card sits at an idle temperature of 33 degrees, which is quite impressive. For reference, anything below 50 degrees is considered okay, and anything below 40 degrees is quite nice. Under heavy load, the card stabilizes at about 71 degrees, which again is pretty good. For testing purposes, we used a few of the latest gaming titles to see how the card performs for new games.
First up is Rise of the Tomb Raider. Running on very high details and Directx 12, we got an impressive 78 FPS on 1080p, while the card was able to manage an average of 52 FPS on 1440p.
Another DirectX 12 title, Hitman was also tested on ultra settings. The card gave an average of 65 FPS on 1080p while on 1440p we got an average framerate of 48 FPS.
We also tested DOOM running on OpenGL 4.5, as that is better optimized for NVIDIA cards. The GTX 1060 performed quite well, with an average rate of 102 FPS on 1080p and 58 FPS on 1440p.
For DirectX 11 performance, we chose Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. Here, the GTX 1060 fell somewhat short, only giving about 37 FPS in 1440p and 52 FPS on 1080p.
The most anticipated benchmark was probably Deus Ex: Mankind Divided as the game only came out a couple of days of ago. Running on ultra with MSAA off, the card gave an average of 32 FPS on 1080p and and 23 FPS on 1440p, which shows that the GTX 1060 struggles a bit when it comes to running a new graphic intensive game.
As a value for money card, the NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1060 is a great product. It is near perfect for 1080p gaming, and in some cases, it also provides great experience in 1440p. And for a price point on $250, this makes it an amazing budget card. However, as the results for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided showed, the card does not seem to be suited for the best experience when it comes to a latest title. So for those who are looking for an interim card while they save money for their next big investment, it doesn’t get better than this.
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