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.



The ASUS GTX 1060 STRIX OC is a custom design variant of the GTX 1060 6 GB, which means it will be significantly faster than the 3 GB version. It also comes overclocked out of the box to a base clock of 1620 MHz, and memory has been overclocked also, to 2052 MHz.

ASUS is using their new triple-fan, dual-slot thermal solution we've seen first on the GTX 1080 STRIX and RX480 STRIX. Also included is a backplate, even though it lacks the RGB-lit ASUS ROG logo we've seen on the company's RX 480.

The ASUS GTX 1060 STRIX OC 6 GB currently retails at $330, which is a pretty big increase from other GTX 1060 6 GB cards that start at $250.