Nvidia GTX 1060 Founders Edition Review

nVidia GTX 1060 Founder Edition Review

Introduction

The Pascal equipped nVidia range has been a star so far. Performance comparisons are always worthwhile so that we can see how a new GPU might compare to our current range and the comparisons of the new models make for good reading. If you’ve missed our reviews so far then the GTX 1080 is around a GTX 980 SLI equivalent, the GTX 1070 is similar to a GTX 980 Ti, and today’s review of the GTX 1060 promises to bring a GTX 980 level of smoothness to your gaming for a very affordable price.

You still get the Pascal benefits of the nVidia version of Freesync, a technology that gives you no screen tearing regardless of frame rate without requiring proprietary hardware and Ansel which lets you unleash your creativity by producing artistic screen grabs freed from the constraints of the game engine.

Normally with these midrange cards the performance emphasis for gamers comes from the affordability of pairing them up in SLI to give top-range performance for a sensible price. This is something which the GTX 1060 no longer supports as it is equipped with no SLI bridge fingers at all. Maybe nVidia are tired of people not buying their top models. However, we’re getting ahead of ourselves, so let’s look at the specifications.

Technical Specifications

The hardware of the GTX 1060 is, with a few minor exceptions, half the card that the GTX 1080 was. We have half the Graphics Processing Clusters which means half the number of SMs, half the CUDA cores and half the Texture Units. ROP units are slightly down from 64 to 48, and the memory is 6GB of regular GDDR5 rather than the 8GB of GDDR5X of the GTX 1080. Clock speeds remain high when compared to the recent generations of nVidia cards, and there are also the full range of display outputs. With half the price and half the features of the big GTX 1080, perhaps that lack of SLI capability is understandable.

nVidia GTX 1060 Founder Edition Review Â