Introduction

GeForce GTX 1060 Market Segment Analysis GeForce

GTX 960 Radeon

R9 380X Radeon

R9 390 GeForce

GTX 970 Radeon

RX 480 Radeon

R9 390X GeForce

GTX 780 Ti GeForce

GTX 980 GeForce

GTX 1060 MSI GTX

1060 Gaming X Radeon R9

Fury Radeon R9

Fury X GeForce

GTX 980 Ti GeForce

GTX Titan X GeForce

GTX 1070 Shader Units 1024 2048 2560 1664 2304 2816 2880 2048 1280 1280 3584 4096 2816 3072 1920 ROPs 32 32 64 56 32 64 48 64 48 48 64 64 96 96 64 Graphics Processor GM206 Tonga Hawaii GM204 Ellesmere Hawaii GK110 GM204 GP106 GP106 Fiji Fiji GM200 GM200 GP104 Transistors 2940M unknown 6200M 5200M 5700M 6200M 7100M 5200M 4400M 4400M 8900M 8900M 8000M 8000M 7200M Memory Size 2 GB 4 GB 8 GB 4 GB 4 GB / 8 GB 8 GB 3 GB 4 GB 6 GB 6 GB 4 GB 4 GB 6 GB 12 GB 8 GB Memory Bus Width 128 bit 256 bit 512 bit 256 bit 256 bit 512 bit 384 bit 256 bit 192 bit 192 bit 4096 bit 4096 bit 384 bit 384 bit 256 bit Core Clock 1127 MHz+ 970 MHz 1000 MHz 1051 MHz+ 1120 - 1266 MHz 1050 MHz 876 MHz+ 1126 MHz+ 1506 MHz+ 1569 MHz+ 1000 MHz 1050 MHz 1000 MHz+ 1000 MHz+ 1506 MHz+ Memory Clock 1753 MHz 1425 MHz 1500 MHz 1750 MHz 2000 MHz 1500 MHz 1750 MHz 1750 MHz 2002 MHz 2002 MHz 500 MHz 500 MHz 1750 MHz 1750 MHz 2002 MHz Price $170 $210 $260 $265 $199 / $229 $310 $390 $360 $249 / $299 $289 $530 $600 $440 $1150 $379 / $449

With NVIDIA announcing the GeForce GTX 1060, the company is allowing its add-in card (AIC) partners to launch their custom-design cards right away. The company set the MSRP of this SKU at US $249 and is selling its reference-design "Founders Edition" SKU at $299, a $50 premium. This allows its partners to launch their custom-design cards at either around the $249 baseline price or the $299 Founders Edition one.The GeForce GTX 1060 is NVIDIA's response to the Radeon RX 480, which offers performance rivaling that of $350 products from the previous-generation, at an attractive $229 price-point. It is based on the newer 16 nm GP106 silicon, which is the third ASIC built on the "Pascal" architecture. This chip features half the SIMD machinery of the GP104 silicon on which the GTX 1080 is based, but has 75% of the raster operation machinery and memory configuration.MSI Gaming is one of the most popular graphics card brands these days, and the company's GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X graphics card we're reviewing today is priced at $289, a $40 premium over the baseline MSRP and $10 cheaper than the Founders Edition. What you get is a custom-design PCB with a stronger VRM, which draws power from an 8-pin PCIe power connector, and the iconic Twin Frozr VI cooling solution, which is also featured on the company's GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 Gaming X products.The GeForce GTX 1060 features 1,280 CUDA cores, 80 TMUs, 48 ROPs, and a 192-bit GDDR5 memory interface with 6 GB of memory. The MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X ships with factory-overclocked speeds of 1569 MHz on the core and an untouched 8 Gbps memory for 192 GB/s of memory bandwidth. You get quite a bit of the feature-set NVIDIA introduced with the "Pascal" architecture, but the biggest omission is support for NVIDIA SLI. The company clearly doesn't want a pair of GTX 1060 cards to outsell one GTX 1080, and it looks as though you won't find SLI on even custom-design cards.