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.

Packaging

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + documentation
• MSI stickers

The Card

We've seen MSI's new TwinFrozr thermal solution on the company's GTX 1070 and 1080, and it looks great due to MSI's attention to little details; it is made of plastic, though, which is unlike the NVIDIA Founders Edition. On the back is a high-quality metal backplate. Dimensions of the card are 28x14 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include a DVI port, an HDMI port, and three DisplayPorts. 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

MSI's cooler uses three heatpipes to keep the card cool.


Once the main heatsink is removed, you can see a second metal plate, which provides cooling for the VRM circuitry and memory chips.


The backplate is made from metal and protects the card against damage during handling and installation.


MSI replaced the single 6-pin power input of the reference design with an 8-pin power connector. This configuration is specified for up to 225 watts of power draw.


NVIDIA's GTX 1060 is introducing a new voltage controller by uPI, the uP 9509P. Its exact feature set is currently unknown.


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, with a transistor count of 4.4 billion and a die size of 200 mm².