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.



Today, we have with us for review the MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Armor OC, which is a cost-effective custom design variant of the GTX 1060 with the same PCB and power-design as the MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X. Out of the box, the card is overclocked to a base clock of 1544 MHz. Memory runs at NVIDIA stock of 2002 MHz. Pricing of the card is $260.