Nvidia sees the success of the AMD RX 480 and raises them the GeForce GTX 1060, the Green Team’s newest sweet spot card. The card’s launch was quick relative to other x60 graphics cards from Nvidia’s stable, taking the stage just a month after the release of the high-end GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. Comparing this to its predecessors which took significantly longer to be revealed, we can see that the midrange mass consumer market is more alluring than ever.
What makes the GTX 1060 special? It’s dubbed as a GTX 980 killer. Yep, Nvidia’s saying that this card has what it takes to stand toe to toe against one of their previous flagships not only in terms of performance, but also in terms of price and power efficiency.
We can point the bold claim towards the all-new 16 nm Pascal chip which improves upon almost every aspect of its Maxwell predecessor. On board are 1280 CUDA cores clocked at a base of 1506 MHz, boosting to 1708 MHz when needed. It has 6 GB of GDDR5 memory buffer with speed of 8 Gbps and bandwidth of 192 GB/s, with the data travelling on a 192-bit-wide bus. The GTX 1060 also needs a 6-pin power connector to feed its teeny 120 W power requirement.
Do note though that the GTX 1060 does not support SLI meaning you can’t cheap your way towards beating the GTX 1080. Still, for what it costs—starting at around USD 250, much less than the 980’s introductory USD 400 tag—and what it’s promised to do, those except the most hardcore should find it enough for running their games at high visual quality.
Quick Specs:
- CUDA Cores: 1280
- Core Speed: 1506 MHz (base); 1708 MHz (boost)
- VRAM: 6 GB GDDR5
- Memory Speed: 8 Gbps
- Memory Bus: 192-bit
- Memory Bandwidth: 192 GB/s
- Power Requirement: 120 W; 6-pin PCIe power required; at least 400 W PSU
- Output: DisplayPort 1.4; HDMI 2.0b; Dual Link DVI
- Others: Multi-projection; VR Ready; Nvidia Ansel, G-Sync, and GameStream ready; DirectX 12 and Mantle API support
- Dimensions: Dual slot, 111.2 x 249.5 mm