Nvidia has announced the brand new GTX 1060
The all new Nvidia GTX 1060 is a high performance graphics card that performs better than the GTX 980, is more efficient, but costs only $249.
Nvidia released the new GTX 1060 a little earlier than anticipated. Why? Because the card is mainly here to compete against the AMD Radeon RX480. The RX 480 is another high performance card that doesn’t break the bank.
The AMD Radeon RX 480 was unveiled just a few weeks ago and has been a reviewers favorite. However, the card could only match or better the performance of an equivalent Nvidia GTX 970. It does feature 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, but isn’t as power efficient as the new GTX 1060. The RX 480 is known to draw more power from the motherboard, but a software update should soon fix that.
The GTX 1060 is based on the Pascal architecture, similar to the top of the line GTX 1070 and 1080. According to Nvidia, the 1060 is faster in performance to the GTX 980, and is more efficient. It has 1280 CUDA cores and a boost clock of 1708 MHz. Nvidia has included 6GB of GDDR5 RAM with 8Gbps memory speed.
Now, the AMD RX 480 is a VR ready graphics card that costs $199. Therefore, Nvidia had to step up their game and provide an alternative. The GTX 1060 is also VR ready, which is great, and it offers better performance than the RX 480.
The Nvidia GTX 1060 is 15 percent faster and 75 percent more power efficient than the AMD RX 480, claims Nvidia.
The new card uses a GP106 chip and the boost clock of 1.7GHz can be overclocked to get speeds beyond 2GHz. The card uses a single 6-pin connector and doesn’t require more than 400W power supply. It’s rated at 120W, which makes it very power efficient.
The card, as mentioned before, is VR ready, which means that you don’t have to spend upwards of $600 to experience VR gaming. The 6GB of onboard memory should be more than enough for VR games. In the future though, you will need more RAM for high-end games or 4K gaming. Then again, the GTX 1060 is a budget graphics card.
Nvidia GTX 1060 Availability
Nvidia will release the GTX 1060 on July 17, and along with that, a Founders Edition will also be launched. This edition will have a better cooler, and a dual-FET power supply. It will also cost more at $299.
If you wanted to get better cooling and performance from the GTX 1060, it would make more sense get one from companies such as Zotac, Asus, etc. Zotac is already readying to variants of the card, a Mini edition and an AMP edition. Pricing for these partner cards haven’t been announced yet, but we reckon they’ll be better than Nvidia’s Founder edition.
As for availability, the Nvidia GTX 1060, the Founders Edition, and all other partner cards will be available for purchase on July 19.
So there you go, a graphics card that provides better performance than the GTX 980, is VR ready, and doesn’t dig a hole in your pocket. The GTX 1060 is sure to hurt sales of the AMD RX 480, because it’s just better.