Intro

The Red Devil RX 590 vs. the EVGA GTX 1060 SC 6GB Overclocking Showdown with 37 Games

This overclocking showdown is a follow-up to the PowerColor Red Devil RX 590 8GB versus the EVGA GTX 1060 SC 6GB evaluation yesterday. Today, we have optimized our overclocks with all performance options set to their highest limits to get the most performance from each card.

At stock, the PowerColor overclocked Red Devil-clocked RX 590 won decisively over the EVGA GTX 1060 SC 6GB. This time, we will overclock the EVGA GTX 1060 SC and the Red Devil RX 590 manually each as far as they will go to see where they stand in relation to each other when fully overclocked.

The Red Devil RX 590 OC

The $279 Red Devil version of the RX 590 8GB is factory overclocked up to its maximum boost speeds of 1576MHz, up from the reference 1545MHz. A few details of our original overclocking may be found here. We found that as long as the the Power and Temperature limits are maximized, it will not throttle even with the Silent BIOS profile.

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After much testing, we settled on a 2.5% overclock or +40MHz to the core for a 1615MHz boost, with memory clocks overclocked +175MHz to 2175MHz. We found that higher memory clocks gained significant performance over a slightly higher core overclock. Adjusting the voltage – undervolting or undervolting – made no practical difference, and we achieved stability in all of our 37 tested games – except for Wolfenstein: The New Colossus which tolerated no overclock.

Overclocking the EVGA GTX 1060 SC 6GB

We devoted a separate evaluation to the EVGA GTX 1060 SC 6GB which you can read here. It currently is priced at $259. As before, we achieved a final stable overclock of +100 MHz to the core which settled in around 2088MHz with GPU Boost. This time our memory overclock reached +650MHz for its clock of 4655MHz.

Testing Platform

We test 37 games and 2 synthetic benchmarks at 1920×1080 and at 2560×1440. We have just added Battlefield V and Hitman 2 which both released this week. Our testing platform is a recent install of Windows 10 64-bit Home Edition, and we are using an i7-8700K which turbos all 6 cores to 4.7GHz, an EVGA Z370 FTW motherboard, and 16GB of HyperX DDR4 3333MHz. The games, settings, and hardware are identical except for the cards being compared.

Before we run our overclocked benchmarks, let’s check out the test configuration.