Sunday, October 28th 2018
NVIDIA's GDDR5X-varnished GTX 1060 Only Ticks at 8.8 Gbps Over 192-bit
NVIDIA is rushing in a new variant of its GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB graphics card to counter AMD's Radeon RX 590, in a bid to reinforce the $250 price-point ahead of the crucial Holiday season. According to specifications of the GTX 1060 6 GB GDDR5X put out by Palit, the GDDR5X version is a little more than a marketing stunt, with something in there for overclockers. The GTX 1060 GamingPro OC+ from Palit is by no means a "baseline" product. It features 6 GB of GDDR5X memory, which ticks at 8800 MHz (GDDR5X effective), and continues to have a 192-bit wide memory interface. At this speed, the GPU ends up with 211.2 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Of course, this story is incomplete without context. Back in 2017, NVIDIA refreshed the GTX 1060 6 GB with 9 Gbps GDDR5 memory (216 GB/s). That variant, although available in some places, isn't the predominant GTX 1060 6 GB variant, as NVIDIA did not retire the original 8 Gbps GTX 1060 6 GB with its launch. This new GDDR5X variant comes with even lower memory clock and bandwidth than that 9 Gbps refresh. The card still only has 1,280 CUDA cores, and the GPU is factory-overclocked by Palit at 1531 MHz core, and 1746 MHz GPU Boost. At best, GDDR5X could vastly improve overclocking headroom, since NVIDIA's partners could be using 10 Gbps-rated GDDR5X chips, which are known to overclock well beyond 11 Gbps.
Of course, this story is incomplete without context. Back in 2017, NVIDIA refreshed the GTX 1060 6 GB with 9 Gbps GDDR5 memory (216 GB/s). That variant, although available in some places, isn't the predominant GTX 1060 6 GB variant, as NVIDIA did not retire the original 8 Gbps GTX 1060 6 GB with its launch. This new GDDR5X variant comes with even lower memory clock and bandwidth than that 9 Gbps refresh. The card still only has 1,280 CUDA cores, and the GPU is factory-overclocked by Palit at 1531 MHz core, and 1746 MHz GPU Boost. At best, GDDR5X could vastly improve overclocking headroom, since NVIDIA's partners could be using 10 Gbps-rated GDDR5X chips, which are known to overclock well beyond 11 Gbps.
43 Comments on NVIDIA's GDDR5X-varnished GTX 1060 Only Ticks at 8.8 Gbps Over 192-bit
And I bet once it’s launched the performance will be exactly the same as current GTX 1060 6GB variants while having a larger premium
The physical limit of semiconductors it's approaching fast, and together with it the escalation of everything, including prices, low availability and specially common sense...
contrary to what you say though, i am considering a 9700k and rtx 2080 ti build, I know it is bad value, but I honestly don't see anything beating its performance for 5 years... i mean noticeably beating its performance... might as well invest now and retire, until silicon is replaced.
i might wait one more generation... 3080 ti versus intel dedicated gpu in 2020... i have no hope left for AMD competing at the high end anymore... Intel prob won't be optimized enough for older games though, so prob will do a 10nm intel chip and a 3080 ti, regardless of price... should last me until silicon is replaced or not replaced, either way i won't be missing out on performance much
Rumors say that these are GP104 based cards, so they should come with more SMs enabled and 10Gbps memory as stock, calling it GTX 1060 Ti or some such would make sense if they are releasing it to counter act the RX 590.
On the other hand nVIDIA might be sitting on a boatload of defective GP104s and they are just cleaning inventory...
I have'nt seen one card in my life that would be negative affected by faster memory. Unless you OC it beyond stable.
I think alot of news sites are writing so much articles about the (anticipated) 590x, that the truth is, AMD has a contract with glofo or TSMC or so, and they happend to improve the node from 14nm to 12nm. There is nothing much special about it as technology improves over time. The 2nm save proberly lowers the power requirement and makes it possible to upp the clocks to 1500Mhz while staying within the 180W TDP.
For any RX580 to stay on 1500Mhz your looking at 200 to 220W of load easy when stressed to it's max.