MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X 3 GB

[W1zzard]

MSI's GTX 1060 Gaming X 3 GB might come with half the memory amount only, but still brings the big guns in form of the large dual-fan TwinFrozr cooler. Our review will test whether 3 GB is a viable alternative to 6 GB if you are trying to save some money.

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[PainfulByte]

Are the charts correct? It scores worst FPS across the board than the reference card?

 

[Chaitanya]

Going forward it seems like GTX 1060 is going to lag behind RX480 in DX12/Vulkan games.

 

[Nokiron]

Are the charts correct? It scores worst FPS across the board than the reference card?

It's the 3GB model.

Like it says on the first page...

Typically GPU vendors use the exact same GPU for SKUs of different memory capacity, just not in this case. NVIDIA has decided to reduce the shader count of GTX 1060 3 GB down to 1152 from 1280 on the 6 GB version. This, roughly 10% reduction in shaders lets the company increase the performance difference between the 3 GB and 6 GB version, which will probably lure potential customers closer to the 6 GB version.

 

[W1zzard]

Are the charts correct? It scores worst FPS across the board than the reference card?

It also has 1152 shaders vs 1280 on 6 GB

 

[hojnikb]

Any chance of testing gainward/palit 1060s with 3 and 6gb of vram. They seems to be quite cheap here in EU.

 

[qubit]

@W1zzard

Typo in the conclusion:

In the bullet points you've stated: Fans don't stop in idle

In the main text you've stated: MSI has also included the idle-fan-off feature we love so much since it provides a perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, Internet browsing, and even light gaming.

 

[Adam Freeman]

Great review with some newer games. The card performs very good at 1080p despite having 3GB of vram, but I wouldn't even
consider buying for 240$, it is simply too expensive and there are many better choices at this price point. For example you can pay
10$ more for the 1060 6GB version from other brand like evga or gigabyte which would be a little noisier but with better
performance and more future proofing. Other choices from AMD like overclocked RX 480 4gb for 230$ that has same performance
in DX11 titles but better in DX12/volkan titles with 1GB more vram. Also for 240$ you can buy sapphire RX 470 8GB which has
way better performance than reference RX 470 tested in this article and it's the only RX 470 in the market that has the same
memory speed as RX 480 8GB which is 8Gb/s.

 

[W1zzard]

@W1zzard

Typo in the conclusion:

In the bullet points you've stated: Fans don't stop in idle

In the main text you've stated: MSI has also included the idle-fan-off feature we love so much since it provides a perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, Internet browsing, and even light gaming.

Lol I forgot to update the +- bullet list Fixed now. Spent too much time thinking about conclusion ^^

 

[qubit]

Lol I forgot to update the +- bullet list Fixed now

That was quick!

So you are actually human then. I suspect a conspiracy.

 

[refillable]

You should stop testing BF4, the game is older than my 2-year-old cousin.

Fallout 4 seems broken in 1080p. No Man Sky (the super stupid hyped game) is broken in all resolution. Deus Ex MD has a stupidly low FPS, it's broken as well. I hope DX12 is going to fix it.

 

[Shatun_Bear]

Fantastic job from W1zzard for updating the benching suite of games. He's delivered all the games I would put in a current review and Hitman being benched in DX12 instead of DX11 is also a noteworthy improvement over before. There are some older titles that still could be removed, but I can't complain too much.

One thing though:

Compared to Radeon RX 480, the GTX 1060 3 GB is right on the same level in our performance summaries - individual game performance varies wildly though, with more recent titles having slightly the upper hand on the RX 480.

This is confusing as you're wording it like you're comparing reference vs reference. But this is comparing high overclocked non-reference 1060 versus reference 480. If you compared MSI Gaming 480 versus this card, the 480 would likely be notably faster.

I'm interested in seeing how the 4GB 480 stacks up against a 3GB 1060 going forward.

 

[Shatun_Bear]

Great review with some newer games. The card performs very good at 1080p despite having 3GB of vram, but I wouldn't even
consider buying for 240$, it is simply too expensive and there are many better choices at this price point. For example you can pay
10$ more for the 1060 6GB version from other brand like evga or gigabyte which would be a little noisier but with better
performance and more future proofing. Other choices from AMD like overclocked RX 480 4gb for 230$ that has same performance
in DX11 titles but better in DX12/volkan titles with 1GB more vram. Also for 240$ you can buy sapphire RX 470 8GB which has
way better performance than reference RX 470 tested in this article and it's the only RX 470 in the market that has the same
memory speed as RX 480 8GB which is 8Gb/s.

Yes I agree with you completely. Personally I would not recommend ANYONE to buy this card when there are better cards around the same price with at least 4GB of VRAM. You can get ITX 6GB 1060s for around the same price. Surely, that would be a better spend of $240. 4GB 480s are also a far more sensible purchase imo.

 

[bug]

On the back is a high-quality metal backplate

No backplate included

I'm pretty sure you need to pick just one. Unless the backplate really wasn't included and you installed one yourself

 

[W1zzard]

I'm pretty sure you need to pick just one. Unless the backplate really wasn't included and you installed one yourself

Fixed. Proofreader uploaded an old version that was lacking my recent edits

 

[jabbadap]

Great review and nice to see new games

There's an error on No man's sky definition, it is using OpenGL4.5 not directx11.

 

[Enterprise24]

Glad to see Totalwar Warhammer integrate into TPU benchmark. Thanks

 

[jabbadap]

Lol I forgot to update the +- bullet list Fixed now. Spent too much time thinking about conclusion ^^

Speaking of it...

• The MSI GTX 1060 6GT OC retails at $240.

I think that should be 3GB, I'm not absolutely certain though: 6GT means 6GB in Finnish but is there some extraordinary half byte variable called T in English language.

 

[Frick]

Oohh a GTX1060 for €50 less, essentially. The high price on Polaris really is killing them.

 

[chaosmassive]

so 900p is gone for good
is there any way to roughly estimate fps increase over 1080p?

 

[ZeppMan217]

TPU's results are better than other reviewers'.

 

[Enterprise24]

so 900p is gone for good
is there any way to roughly estimate fps increase over 1080p?

Actually I like 900p result. It can check GPU driver efficiency in cpu intensive situation.

 

[W1zzard]

There's an error on No man's sky definition, it is using OpenGL4.5 not directx11.

Fixed

I think that should be 3GB, I'm not absolutely certain though: 6GT means 6GB in Finnish

and fixed. Copy and paste from the previous MSI review

 

[bug]

so 900p is gone for good
is there any way to roughly estimate fps increase over 1080p?

1,920x1,080=2,073,600 pixels
1,600x900=1,440,000 pixels

1,440,000/2,073,600=0.69

That's a theoretical maximum of 30% more performance when pushing less pixels. Depending on how much a given title is CPU bottlenecked, you'll see 10-25% more performance in practice. Less than 10% in non-demanding games, but those would already be running at hundreds of FPS.

 

[HD64G]

Great review and the 1st one in months to include the latest tech and games also. With Mankind Divided patched up to DX12 this gamelist will safely give the correct result for any comparison from now on. This 1060 3GB is a mistake in marketing from nVidia. It should be 1060Ti for the 6GB or 1050Ti for this one. And with 480 4GB being cheaper even in custom models it will have hard times imho. Bravo to MSI for this cooler though. Excellent performance & noise control at once.

@W1zzard : How comes that in this review many games gave much different results than in previous reviews? I talk about 10-20% more or less in comparison for same game and GPUs.