ASUS GTX 1060 DUAL OC 6GB Graphics Card Review pt1

US$279.99 – ASUS GTX 1060 DUALPH – Approx. Php18,800

Price / Where to Buy

US: US$279.99 – ASUS GTX 1060 DUAL
PH – Approx. Php18,800

With the immense success of the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Pascal GPUs from NVIDIA, it seemed they would hold on to their midrange cards a bit longer but in a relatively bold move, they’ve announced their GTX 1060 midrange GPU hot off the heels of their high-end launch. The GTX 1060 is squarely placed in the center of the mainstream market and is directly being compared to the GTX 980 but with greater efficiency, temperatures and overall performance. That being said, NVIDIA does cut this card back a bit and we’ll take a look at a couple of the cards that came out fresh off GTX 1060 announcement.

ABOUT THE NVIDIA GTX 1060

The GTX 1060 is based on the same Pascal architecture as the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 but utilizes a newer GP106 GPU on the same 16nm FinFET process. All the Pascal features are also in this card with the GTX 1060 utilizing 1280 CUDA cores running with a base clock of 1506Mhz and can boost up to 1708Mhz. Memory runs at 8Ghz and is wired to a 192-bit bus with a total of 6GB. A 3GB variant is also available but that is a different specsheet altogether.

The GTX 1060 6GB requires a single 6-pin power connector and has no SLI support.

ABOUT THE ASUS GTX 1060 DUAL OC

The ASUS GTX 1060 DUAL sits below the current ROG STRIX product stack and serves as the more mainstream offering featuring a more conservative feature set than its higher-end counterpart. ASUS tailors the DUAL series to match its mainstream motherboard series sporting a black and white motiff with subtle blue trims for highlights.

The ASUS GTX GTX 1060 DUAL is offered in both a stock variant running in reference clocks and an OC model with slightly increased clock speeds. The ASUS GTX 1060 DUAL OC features an OC mode and Gaming Mode (default) which allows it to have varying clock speeds. Out of box gaming mode runs at a boost clock of 1785 MHz , with the GPU base clock at 1569 MHz. OC mode can be enabled via the GPU Tweak II interface allowing a boost clock of 1809 MHz  and base of 1594 MHz. That’s nearly a 100Mhz bump higher than reference. Memory clock is untouched.

Product Gallery – ASUS GTX 1060 DUAL OC

PERFORMANCE

Test Setup

Processor: Intel Core i7 6700K
Motherboard: ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Ranger
Memory: Kingston HyperX SAVAGE DDR4-3000 16GB
Storage: Intel SSD 750 NVME U.2 SSD
PSU: Thermaltake ToughPower Grand 1000w Gold
Cooling: Thermaltake Water 3.0 Riings 360mm
Monitor: ASUS PG27AQ UHD Monitor
VGA: ASUS GTX 1060 DUAL OC

For a full-hardware workout, visit http://www.futuremark.com  for our benchmarks of choice.

For benchmarking methodology please see our game benchmark method guide.

Driver: NVIDIA GeForce 372.54, AMD Crimson 16.7.3
Operating System: Windows 10 64-bit

Frame rates and frame times of a 60-second game play were recorded using FRAPS v3.5.99. The test results are the average of 3 benchmark runs. Since this is a GPU review, we benchmarked the area of the games that put heavy load on the GPU.

All our test runs are repeatable, click the links below for area and details. Read our benchmarking methodology.

• Crysis 3 – Post Human
• Grand Theft Auto V – Palomino Highlands
• The Witcher 3 – Woesong Bridge
• Rise of the Tomb Raider – Valley Farmstead
• DOTA2 – Shanghai Major Finals, Game 2, Team Secret vs Team Liquid (23:45 – 24:45)

Note: Some proprietary technologies of NVIDIA like PCSS, HBAO+, and HairWorks work on AMD GPU’s but we decided not to use them.

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