NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition Review @ [H]

I was honestly expecting better performance from the 1060 given how NVIDIA was accurate with their comparisons for the 1080 and 1070. Reading this review, I think you would be best served by a RX 480 8GB at the same price. DX12 and Vulkan are only going to be more widely utilized.
 
Nenu said:
But but, how well does it clock? :D
Surely it has to be more % capable than the 480.
Lower power cards are dwarfed by the coolers, there could be a nice benefit.
Its nice to also have breathing room on the power rails.
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You would need to average the clock speed over the runs, then compare that to ~2050mhz most cards appears to be capable of ; if we assume 1800mhz "stock" with boost 3.0 on average for an FE, then 2050mhz is 14%

Rizen said:
I was honestly expecting better performance from the 1060 given how NVIDIA was accurate with their comparisons for the 1080 and 1070. Reading this review, I think you would be best served by a RX 480 8GB at the same price. DX12 and Vulkan are only going to be more widely utilized.
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Just because DOOM VK favors the 480 doesn't mean every VK game will... Same with DX12

Here in italy it looks like the "normal models" with just aftermarket cooling and no OC like this one

VGA Zotac GeForce GTX 1060 6G - Spedizione Gratis - ZT-P10600A-10L - Acquista on-line su :: Ak Informatica ::

Will sell for around 270-290 euros. The high end Strix, MSI gaming etc are ridiculously overpriced atm, 340 euros ++
 
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-Dragon- said:
Ok it was fixed in the driver but as the card comes out of the box it can still wreck shit. And yes 35W difference could be a big deal for OEMs who a) want to use as small of a PSU as they can get away with and b) don't want components in their systems they know will run out of spec for fear of increasing warranty issues. It seems that as an OEM a 1060 is a no brainer over a 480.
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So a non-issue for regular users and a non-issue for all with improved non-reference models, got it.

Neat, 1060 wins! And yes it is fucking disturbing that AMD's power draw is such garbage that they needed a full die shrink to almost catch up to their competitors old cards.
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Yes, it wins by -14% at most current prices and by +4% at the elusive 10xx MSRP.

There are pros and cons for either choice between these cards with some bigger advantages either way depending on the game. Your one sided doom and gloom conclusion is misplaced at best.
 
Rizen said:
I was honestly expecting better performance from the 1060 given how NVIDIA was accurate with their comparisons for the 1080 and 1070. Reading this review, I think you would be best served by a RX 480 8GB at the same price. DX12 and Vulkan are only going to be more widely utilized.
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nvidia was expecting the RX 480 to compete more with the 1070 than the 1060, so they gimped it. Now, because the 480 is priced similar to the 1060 and performing worse than nvidia expected, they're now competing cards and nvidia had to try and squeeze as much as they could out of the 1060. That's how I see it, anyway.
 
Rizen said:
I was honestly expecting better performance from the 1060 given how NVIDIA was accurate with their comparisons for the 1080 and 1070. Reading this review, I think you would be best served by a RX 480 8GB at the same price. DX12 and Vulkan are only going to be more widely utilized.
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I was thinking the same. I guess I'll have to tell my gaming buddies that this isn't the card they were waiting for, and to look out for that Asus RX 480 STRIX that is supposed to be the bees knees. They only play the latest and greatest games.
 
This pricing bullshit needs to STOP.

Since FE cards are often times INFERIOR to AIB overclocked cards, the reviews should compare at the FE price.
At the time I post this (~2 hours after publication), there is NOT A SINGLE 1060 on newegg for <$300.

As the review conclusion shows, there were 3 cards out of 10 which were sold for MSRP.
Newegg likely had very little stock of those models. AIBs love the high pricing of the FE cards and the lowball MSRP because they know that consumers now expect to have to pay $50 more than MSRP to actually get their hands on a card.

Therefore, the review should consider the ACTUAL PRICES OF CARDS IN STOCK and ignore the fucking $249 MSRP.

Name ONE retail item which is priced ABOVE MSRP. Retailers have sales to DISCOUNT below MSRP.
They don't price cars at 20% ABOVE MSRP because they added rims to the car.

I liken nVidia's MSRP to "YMMV" at slickdeals when somebody finds an item on clearance at their local Best Buy/Walmart/Lowes whatever.

Yeah, ok, some people may get lucky and get it for MSRP. nVidia is sheer genius because they've created excitement in consumers to buy something for MSRP.
 
Quartz-1 said:
Brent_Justice notes in his response to me above that it doesn't impact the gameplay experience.
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It doesn't impact the gameplay experience at the reviewed titles, but in other titles who can tell? that's why i posted a link from a review at youtube which measures smootheness between frame rates , but the link is no more because my post have been......... edited.
 
J Macker said:
This pricing bullshit needs to STOP.

Since FE cards are often times INFERIOR to AIB overclocked cards, the reviews should compare at the FE price.
At the time I post this (~2 hours after publication), there is NOT A SINGLE 1060 on newegg for <$300.

As the review conclusion shows, there were 3 cards out of 10 which were sold for MSRP.
Newegg likely had very little stock of those models. AIBs love the high pricing of the FE cards and the lowball MSRP because they know that consumers now expect to have to pay $50 more than MSRP to actually get their hands on a card.

Therefore, the review should consider the ACTUAL PRICES OF CARDS IN STOCK and ignore the fucking $249 MSRP.

Name ONE retail item which is priced ABOVE MSRP. Retailers have sales to DISCOUNT below MSRP.
They don't price cars at 20% ABOVE MSRP because they added rims to the car.
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If they werent selling off the shelves, they would be priced differently. This goes for any product, but is increasingly true with tech products.
 
Bowman15 said:
That 1060 - 192 bit memory bus at 1440P is what scares me the most vs the 480.
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Fair point, but just go and see 1440p benchmark tests, also 32 vs 48 ROPs - also worth noting this isn't a good card for 1440p in general, at least for recent games.
 
Ieldra said:
You would need to average the clock speed over the runs, then compare that to ~2050mhz most cards appears to be capable of ; if we assume 1800mhz "stock" with boost 3.0 on average for an FE, then 2050mhz is 14%
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I agree this is most likely for the FE.
There is a chance they could trump 2050MHz by a substantial margin with better coolers.

For example I had a GTX980 that went over 1600MHz witha monster cooler.
My following GTX980ti cannot make 1500MHz without a 1.25V bios mod and super high fan with the default EVGA ACX 2.0 cooler. It only did 1430MHz stable with the stock bios and acceptable sound level.
With an AC Xtreme IV cooler I got it to 1470MHz with the stock bios, but still nowhere near the GTX980 1600MHz.
Smaller cores can benefit more from large coolers.
 
Meeho said:
So a non-issue for regular users and a non-issue for all with improved non-reference models, got it.
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I wasn't talking about regular users, I was talking about OEMs who are deciding if they want to order a million of these things to stick in pre-built systems. They have the choice between two cards, a red one, and a green one. Both the red one and the green one cost the same and perform about the same, the only difference is the red card uses more power and has a history of drawing power out of spec and rumors, substantiated or not, of damaging lower end motherboards with this out of spec power draw, the exact kind of motherboards you intend to use. The green card has zero down sides. Which part are you going to chose to buy a million of and sell for a tiny amount of profit in this commodity market? How much money are you willing to risk on the red card not increasing warranty repairs and how much extra money are you willing to invest in PSUs to power them? Zero, you're willing to pony up or risk zero dollars since you can just use the green card and have none of those problems. This is not a win for AMD.
 
I ordered this for one my rigs. Had 50 in reward dollars and then another 10% back. Ended up costing me 208 dollars after taxes or so. Now if AIBs had RX 480 cards I might have gone that route. But for 200 this was very tempting. Being available was the main reason for me pulling the trigger. Still I got 30 days to return it if anything but I don't think I will. My older rig will be happy for a while.

PNY - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 Graphics Card
 
Thanks for the review. Opinion follows... ;)

The 1060 is a bit of "meh". The 480 beats it. Unless you're devoted to a particular manufacturer or are extremely sensitive to an extra ~35 watts of heat in your computer, I can't see much reason to choose the 1060 over the 480.

I'd been hoping for better. For both 1060 and 480. :)

Regardless, at ~$250, we're getting some great performance. The jump to the next tier of performance, at $400, is too steep. /Opinon Off.

Ken
 
Well after reading the TPU review, I have now a much better perception of this card, it is consistently faster than the GTX 980, however I would still pick a RX 480 over the GTX 1060.. that's the good about having a larger suite of games for comparison instead of just 4...
 
Araxie said:
Well after reading the TPU review, I have now a much better perception of this card, it is consistently faster than the GTX 980, however I would still pick a RX 480 over the GTX 1060.. that's the good about having a larger suite of games for comparison instead of just 4...
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It is consistently faster in canned benchmarks. It is not consistently faster than the 980 when you use the 1060 as you would use it in the real world.
 
Based on these numbers, the 4GB RX-480 is clearly a better choice. You save a whopping 20% (fifty bucks) and get better performance. 1080p doesn't need 8GB and these aren't 1440p or certainly 4k cards.

Of course like they said in the review, what really matters is how overclocked AIB cards compare-- Pascal is one hell of an overclocker. I can easily see a solid 2Ghz 1060 smoking an overclocked 480.

On a side note, very happy to see Nvidia backing away from the Founders Edition debacle. That really did piss off gamers. Huge miscalculation.
 
schizo said:
On a side note, very happy to see Nvidia backing away from the Founders Edition debacle. That really did piss off gamers. Huge miscalculation.
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Huh?

Did you see the prices of the AIB cards. Zotac is cheapest @ $280 so far.
 
schizo said:
Based on these numbers, the 4GB RX-480 is clearly a better choice. You save a whopping 20% (fifty bucks) and get better performance. 1080p doesn't need 8GB and these aren't 1440p or certainly 4k cards.

Of course like they said in the review, what really matters is how overclocked AIB cards compare-- Pascal is one hell of an overclocker. I can easily see a solid 2Ghz 1060 smoking an overclocked 480.

On a side note, very happy to see Nvidia backing away from the Founders Edition debacle. That really did piss off gamers. Huge miscalculation.
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Uh, Doom requires 5GB or more to run nightmare settings regardless of resolution, and these cards are capable of powering Doom at 1080p with nightmare settings, and while it may just be the one game today, today is the day these cards are coming out, why would you limit yourself out of the gate not to mention a year or two from now?
 
Disappointing performance, I was expecting it to be clearly faster than a 480 but it is not.
AMD : 1 Nvidia : 0 for this one I'd say
 
Nenu said:
I agree this is most likely for the FE.
There is a chance they could trump 2050MHz by a substantial margin with better coolers.

For example I had a GTX980 that went over 1600MHz witha monster cooler.
My following GTX980ti cannot make 1500MHz without a 1.25V bios mod and super high fan with the default EVGA ACX 2.0 cooler. It only did 1430MHz stable with the stock bios and acceptable sound level.
With an AC Xtreme IV cooler I got it to 1470MHz with the stock bios, but still nowhere near the GTX980 1600MHz.
Smaller cores can benefit more from large coolers.
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The 980 Ti has 53% more transistors than the 980, with a comparable difference in TDP. Of course it's not going to get close to the same clock speeds of a smaller chip.

Not saying that the 1060 couldn't clock better with a different cooler, but then again its power could be locked down like the other Pascal chips.
 
-Dragon- said:
Uh, Doom requires 5GB or more to run nightmare settings regardless of resolution, and these cards are capable of powering Doom at 1080p with nightmare settings, and while it may just be the one game today, today is the day these cards are coming out, why would you limit yourself out of the gate not to mention a year or two from now?
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Because they will be obsolete for maxing out a game that would need >4gb ram 2 years down the road
 
-Dragon- said:
Uh, Doom requires 5GB or more to run nightmare settings regardless of resolution, and these cards are capable of powering Doom at 1080p with nightmare settings, and while it may just be the one game today, today is the day these cards are coming out, why would you limit yourself out of the gate not to mention a year or two from now?
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One game, and like many high-end toggles, nightmare settings aren't noticeably better looking unless you very closely scrutinize screenshots. Yes, maybe games coming out concurrently with the Xbone console refresh will use >4GB RAM under ultra settings at 1080p. But that's 2 years away, and we're talking about a $200 videocard here.

Re founders editions, they aren't an early adopters tax for the 1060, and will only be sold directly by Nvidia rather than having every OEM rebrand the same card. So it's not annoying.
 
Ieldra said:
You would need to average the clock speed over the runs, then compare that to ~2050mhz most cards appears to be capable of ; if we assume 1800mhz "stock" with boost 3.0 on average for an FE, then 2050mhz is 14%



Just because DOOM VK favors the 480 doesn't mean every VK game will... Same with DX12
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You're not wrong, but the performance delta between the two in DX11 titles is very small, and AMD is historically pretty good about squeezing additional performance out of their architectures over the life of the product. Given this, I would probably hedge my bets with an RX 480 over a 1060.
 
schizo said:
Of course like they said in the review, what really matters is how overclocked AIB cards compare-- Pascal is one hell of an overclocker. I can easily see a solid 2Ghz 1060 smoking an overclocked 480.
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I would keep in mind just how fast this GPU is running under gaming already. Well above its base clock. At 2GHz, you are only looking at a clock speed increase of 8.5%.
 
As always AIB cards following founders edition foot steps a s hovering around it. Seen only a few at 249.99 one to be exact that I saw. This is what happens when nvidia decides to fuck up the reference pricing. AIB partners have an open playing field. To them their price tag is justified because their coolers are more effective and quieter. O well this is the new pricing structure with nvidia. Msrp is just a paper price now with actual being reference founders edition.
 
NKD said:
So true. Them boost clocks. Though. Lol
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I honestly feel like NV are biting themselves in the ass with the dvfs, there should be a set boost clock written on the box the card doesn't go above, then AIB factory OC and user OC does the rest. Else people complain about lack of OC headroom :p
 
The only thing not sold out on Newegg when I looked was the ASUS ROG STRIX 1060 OC.

So I bought it, at $329. It will do a great job running my other four monitors while the ROG STRIX 1080 runs the 4K primary display. And most importantly, it will dump a lot less heat into the case than the GTX 970 it is replacing.

For me, the output options and low power dissipation made the ROG STRIX 1060 the best card for this application. I doubt this is the norm though. :D

Edit: corrected a typo, it was $329, not $349.
 
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Ieldra said:
I honestly feel like NV are biting themselves in the ass with the dvfs, there should be a set boost clock written on the box the card doesn't go above, then AIB factory OC and user OC does the rest. Else people complain about lack of OC headroom :p
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I've always wondered why AMD doesn't do same thing. Makes sense from a performance standpoint, most people really don't bother to overclock so the card is just doing it for them at a rate it can handle.
 
Brent_Justice said:
So you are buying something with the idea that it can have a second card added to it for better performance, but never actually end up doing that? You are basically buying something based on potential but never utilize that potential? What's the point then?

Boggles the mind

I have a magic bean I'd like to sell you
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I bought my 390X with the thought that I'll add a second at some point. Just waiting for prices to drop, actually, before I pull the trigger. If prices don't drop, and the 490 is a good card / upgrade from the 390X, I might go that route. But, I've always bought a middle-upper range card with the option to buy a second if needed. Started with one 260, then added a second, did the same with 560ti.

At the time I was looking to upgrade, my budget, plus what I could have gotten for my current card, would not have netted me enough to buy another single card that would have out performed two of what I already had.
 
Ieldra said:
I honestly feel like NV are biting themselves in the ass with the dvfs, there should be a set boost clock written on the box the card doesn't go above, then AIB factory OC and user OC does the rest. Else people complain about lack of OC headroom :p
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and I think they also bit their ass and did what amd did with fury x. Over promise and sort of under deliver. Hype was real with this and even with insane boost speeds it comes around the same average as rx 480. I got mine for cheap only reason I pulled the trigger because its a system with a cheap power supply. At 208 for me I couldn't help it lol. My best buy points were sitting their waiting to be used. you are right though now it seems all of sudden this thing is boosting way above stock boost clocks and rx 480 reference is at its boost clock. The RX 480 AIB cards are only going to be faster now with less headroom for the 1060. Its weird to think this but its true. Surprised that this card is boosting so much out of the box and still not able to beat rx 480 in every game.

O well not for me, cheap card for kids system when they come over lol. They will be happy. I do have 30 days to test it lol.
 
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