Introduction

When NVIDIA announced the GeForce GTX 1060, the company allowed its add-in card (AIC) partners to launch their custom-design cards right away. The company set the MSRP of this SKU at US$249 and is selling its reference-design "Founders Edition" SKU at $299, a $50 premium. This allows its partners to position their custom-design cards at either around the $249 baseline price or the $299 Founders Edition one.

The GeForce GTX 1060 is NVIDIA's response to the Radeon RX 480, which offers performance rivaling that of $350 products from the previous generation at an attractive $229 price point. It is based on the newer 16 nm GP106 silicon, which is the third ASIC built on the "Pascal" architecture. This chip features half the SIMD machinery of the GP104 silicon on which the GTX 1080 is based, but has 75% of the raster operation machinery and memory configuration.



Gigabyte's GTX 1060 XtremeGaming is the company's highest-clocked GTX 1060 variant, featuring 6 GB of VRAM and a large overclock to a base clock of 1620 MHz out of the box; memory is overclocked as well.

As the thermal solution on the $300 GTX 1060 XtremeGaming, Gigabyte uses a triple-slot, dual-fan cooler.

Packaging

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Documentation
• Gigabyte wrist band
• Gigabyte case badge

The Card

Visually, the card looks like a shrunk down version of the other Gigabyte XtremeGaming cards we've seen before. Most of the cooler is dominated by black plastic, with some silver highlights. You'll find a metal backplate on the back. Dimensions of the card are 28.0 cm x 13.5 cm.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include a DVI port, an HDMI port, and three DisplayPorts. On the back of the card are another two HDMI ports. Since the NVIDIA GPU does not support as many active outputs at the same time, Gigabyte added extra circuitry to the board to detect your output configuration. Detection requires a reboot, so when running in VR mode with 3x HDMI and 3x DP ports enabled, connecting a DVI monitor does nothing until you reboot. The card will detect the outputs and switch to the non-VR configuration of 1x DVI, 1x HDMI and 3x DP once the reboot has taken place. Unlike previous NVIDIA cards, the DVI port no longer includes an analog signal, so you'll have to use an active adapter. NVIDIA also updated DisplayPort to be 1.2 certified and 1.3/1.4 ready, which enables support for 4K @ 120 Hz and 5K @ 60 Hz or 8K @ 60 Hz with two cables.

The GPU also comes with an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 2.0b compatible, which supports HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies. The GPU video encoding unit has been updated to support HEVC at 10-bit and 12-bit.


The GeForce GTX 1060 does not support SLI.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back).

A Closer Look

Gigabyte's thermal solution uses four heatpipes to keep the GPU cool.


The backplate has thermal pads for a little bit of cooling for the VRM circuitry.


Gigabyte upgraded the power input of their GTX 1060 to an 8-pin. This input configuration is specified for up to 225 watts of power draw.


The uP 9511 voltage controller is a new model for recent NVIDIA cards. It does not support voltage control via I2C.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4G80325FB-HC25. They are specified to run at 2000 MHz (8000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


NVIDIA's GP106 graphics processor is the second consumer chip using the Pascal architecture. It is produced on a 16 nm process at TSMC, Taiwan, and has a transistor count of 4.4 billion and a die size of 200 mm².