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Nvidia launched its GeForce GTX 1060 6GB in July of 2016 to inevitable comparisons with AMD's Radeon RX 480 8GB. Although the 1060 was faster in DX11 games, it also commanded a premium that was harder to justify than the uncontested GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080.
A month later, Nvidia quietly rolled out a 3GB version of the 1060 to battle the 4GB RX 480. Its GPU took quite a haircut in the process, though, dropping from 1280 to 1152 CUDA cores and affecting performance far more than model name suggests. Presumably, Nvidia couldn't risk the 3GB and 6GB models appearing too similar at 1920x1080.
After wrapping up our initial GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1070 round-ups, Tom's Hardware DE set to work on a collection of 1060s, 3GB and 6GB alike. This first incarnation includes eight different boards from a field that spans anywhere from under $200 (£150) to over $300 (£250). Each individual review goes incredibly deep, covering manufacturing quality, technical features, power consumption, clock rates, cooling, and acoustics.
The gaming performance of every factory-overclocked board within a given chip class is usually pretty similar to begin with. But that's more true now than ever. This is a result of features like GPU Boost 3.0, which allows manufacturers to safely extract as much headroom as possible from a processor. Very little is left on the table, even if you have access to extreme overclocking hardware.
We will continue to update this roundup as new test samples become available.
The final analysis of each card is listed below for quick and easy comparison.
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