Introduction

With NVIDIA announcing the GeForce GTX 1060, the company is allowing 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 launch 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.



MSI Gaming is one of the most popular graphics card brands these days, and the company's GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X graphics card we're reviewing today is priced at $289, a $40 premium over the baseline MSRP and $10 cheaper than the Founders Edition. What you get is a custom-design PCB with a stronger VRM, which draws power from an 8-pin PCIe power connector, and the iconic Twin Frozr VI cooling solution, which is also featured on the company's GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 Gaming X products.

The GeForce GTX 1060 features 1,280 CUDA cores, 80 TMUs, 48 ROPs, and a 192-bit GDDR5 memory interface with 6 GB of memory. The MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X ships with factory-overclocked speeds of 1569 MHz on the core and an untouched 8 Gbps memory for 192 GB/s of memory bandwidth. You get quite a bit of the feature-set NVIDIA introduced with the "Pascal" architecture, but the biggest omission is support for NVIDIA SLI. The company clearly doesn't want a pair of GTX 1060 cards to outsell one GTX 1080, and it looks as though you won't find SLI on even custom-design cards.