Evga Gtx 1060 6gb Review

[Quinton Hebenstreit]

Weve seen a slew of custom GeForce GTX 1060 graphics cards following the launch of the Founders Edition back in July, and the one thing that has surprised us is that partner designs have tended to be big, long or chunky. There's nothing wrong with large cards per se, particularly if top-notch cooling is high on the agenda, yet the 120W TDP of the underlying GPU seems to suggest that GTX 1060 should be a pint-sized affair.

Manufacturers eager to re-purpose existing coolers don't appear to be in a hurry to serve up compact cards better suited to small-form-factor PCs; however there are a couple of petite options out there. EVGA, a firm best known for its enthusiast gear, has decided to go small with its GeForce GTX 1060 SC Gaming.

Priced at 260 and measuring 173mm in length, this dual-slot take on Nvidia's 200mm GPU is one of the shortest to date and stands out as a prime candidate for mini-ITX PCs. Do be careful when browsing the retail shelves, however, as the same cooler design is applied to multiple models, including a new 3GB card which appears attractive at 195 but has, unusually, been revealed to have fewer shaders.

It's the full-fat, 6GB card on the test bench today, meaning 1,280 shaders, 80 texture units and 48 render output units allied to the frame buffer via a 192-bit bus. These 16nm credentials are a good fit for a card of this size, and EVGA's implementation is neat and tidy. The heatsink shroud is pleasant in appearance, the solitary fan should have no trouble taming the underlying GPU, and contrary to the recent trend, there are no flashy LEDs to speak of.

There's no backplate either, and though overall rigidity is good thanks to the chunky block of aluminium sandwiched in the middle, EVGA's modest design is up against a range of competitors whose cards include backplates as standard.

One area in which the GTX 1060 SC Gaming doesn't skimp is the out-the-box overclock. Base and boost clocks are heightened to 1,607MHz and 1,835MHz, respectively, up from 1,506MHz and 1,708MHz on the Founders Edition. A seven-per-cent increase is always welcome, however there's been no movement on the 6GB of GDDR5 memory, which operates at a reference-matching 8,008MHz.

Given the size of the board, it's no surprise to find that there are few extra features to ponder over. There's no secondary BIOS, no SLI capability (per Nvidia's mandate) and the power requirement remains a single six-pin connector. Simple and straightforward thus far, though our testing did reveal an oddity in that fan speed wouldn't dip below 45 per cent during use, making the card unnecessarily noisy at all times.

A BIOS update enabling a 0dB fan mode that we've come to expect on modern GeForce boards is available from the EVGA forum. We've been able to apply the patch to our review sample without a hitch, yet initial feedback seems to suggest that the update doesn't work on AMD motherboards.

It's unusual to see an EVGA graphics card with BIOS issues still to be resolved, though further examination shows that it's an Nvidia-related problem, not EVGA's, because it transpires that the flashing tool doesn't recognise AMD chipset-based boards. We hope Nvidia can fix this very soon.

If you own the GTX 1060 SC Gaming it's worth checking to see if you have the updated software already installed. Freeware utility GPU-Z will highlight the BIOS version number, with 86.06.0E.00.62 being the latest.

Elsewhere, the selection of outputs hasn't been altered, with EVGA sticking with Nvidia's default selection of dual-link DVI, HDMI 2.0 and a trio of DisplayPort 1.4, and the manufacturer backs the card with its standard three-year warranty.

Though GPU power requirements have fallen significantly in recent years, smaller cards remain few and far between. It's frankly nice to see one, and there is a certain satisfaction to such form factors - this may be one of the smallest GTX 1060s around, yet it will still run rings around many previous-generation behemoths. Compared with one of its own GTX 970s, EVGA reckons the GTX 1060 SC Gaming is 23 per cent faster, 17 per cent cooler and 28 per cent smaller. Let's now see what our in-house benchmarks have to say.

The card itself is relatively simple and compact but that $10 premium you are paying for goes into more than just some additional speed. The SC has an upgraded cooler with copper heatpipes and a large aluminum fin array whereas the regular Gaming-series utilizes a more basic setup with a straightforward anodized heatsink without any additional heatpipes.

The intent of this somewhat late review is to determine where the GTX 1060 3GB ultimately lies now that both NVIDIA and AMD have their cards positioned for the Christmas shopping season. Will its limited memory size cause a bottleneck in more demanding games? To give a boarder idea of how things sit, two cards will be used: the EVGA GTX 1060 3GB Superclocked and that same card flashed with a reference BIOS so it runs at stock speeds.

For DX12 many of these same metrics can be utilized through a simple program called PresentMon. Not only does this program have the capability to log frame times at various stages throughout the rendering pipeline but it also grants a slightly more detailed look into how certain API and external elements can slow down rendering times.

Since PresentMon throws out massive amounts of frametime data, we have decided to distill the information down into slightly more easy-to-understand graphs. Within them, we have taken several thousand datapoints (in some cases tens of thousands), converted the frametime milliseconds over the course of each benchmark run to frames per second and then graphed the results. This gives us a straightforward framerate over time graph. Meanwhile the typical bar graph averages out every data point as its presented.

One thing to note is that our DX12 PresentMon results cannot and should not be directly compared to the FCAT-based DX11 results. They should be taken as a separate entity and discussed as such.

Battlefield 1 will likely become known as one of the most popular multiplayer games around but it also happens to be one of the best looking titles around. It also happens to be extremely well optimized with even the lowest end cards having the ability to run at high detail levels.

Deus Ex titles have historically combined excellent storytelling elements with action-forward gameplay and Mankind Divided is no difference. This run-through uses the streets and a few sewers of the main hub city Prague along with a short action sequence involving gunplay and grenades.

In GTA V we take a simple approach to benchmarking: the in-game benchmark tool is used. However, due to the randomness within the game itself, only the last sequence is actually used since it best represents gameplay mechanics.

The Hitman franchise has been around in one way or another for the better part of a decade and this latest version is arguably the best looking. Adjustable to both DX11 and DX12 APIs, it has a ton of graphics options, some of which are only available under DX12.

The benchmark run we use is within the Soviet Installation level where we start in at about the midpoint, run through a warehouse with some burning its and then finish inside a fenced-in area during a snowstorm.[/I]

Unlike some of the latest Total War games, the hotly anticipated Warhammer title has been relatively bug free, performs well on all systems and still incorporates the level detail and graphics fidelity this series is known for. In this sequence, we use the in-game benchmarking tool to play back one of our own 40 second gameplay sessions which includes two maxed-out armies and includes all of the elements normally seen in standard gameplay. That means zooms and pans are used to pivot the camera and get a better view of the battlefield.

The benchmark run we use is within the Soviet Installation level where we start in at about the midpoint, run through a warehouse with some burning its and then finish inside a fenced-in area during a snowstorm.

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we used 15 minutes of Unigine Valley running on a loop while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 15 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption.

This is a mining review of some of the popular coins that can be mined with the Nvidia GTX 1060 from Evga.

Lets jump right in and take a look at Decred with about 1700 MH/s this card more than doubles the speed of the old ASUS GTX 950

3a8082e126