Why I bought this card: I needed a card to put in fairly budget rig I was building, and this was one of the cheaper cards available at the time.
TL;DR : A very solid card, overclocks nicely, had no temp problems while gaming, fairly quiet. Definitely would recommend.
Pros:
-Good Cooler for the price
-Plug and play, all you need are the Nvidia drivers and the card will work just fine.
-GPU Tweak II is easy to use and gives full control over the performance of the card.
-Overclock like beast, max OC was 2062 MHz, average OC was 2025 MHz.
-2 HDMI ports, good not only for VR, but also for those who do not have any DP capable monitors.
-No coil whine
Cons:
-Shroud feels cheap
-Fans on the louder side
-The presets in the card management utility(GPU Tweak) are lackluster, make your own profiles for best performance.
Other thoughts: For the 275$ I paid for this card at the time of purchase I expected some slightly better fans, though the current one get the job done fine.
Full Review:
Shipping and Packaging:
Card shipped very fast, even though amazon predicted that it would take up to two weeks to ship, I got it in three days. The packaging was undamaged and very well done, with foam padding all around the card to prevent damage, though even the outer box in which the card was shipped was undamaged.
First Impression:
The card had an average weight at this length. The white plastic shroud felt on the cheaper side, though this is to be expected on a 1060 25$ above MSRP. The fans looked and felt like solid, medium quality fans. There is no back plate, but at this price that is the standard.
Installation:
Nothing out of the ordinary, card went into the pci-e slot with no issues and the 6 pin power connector had no problems going in either.
General Use:
The card performed very nicely after simply installing the latest drivers from Nvidia, so anyone looking for a plug and play card, you will find this card very satisfactory in that regard. The card will handle games at 1080p like the average GTX 1060, so I won't bother posting the benchmarks, because they are available from many different sources.
Different Modes & Overclocking:
Initially I was going dock this card a star for being nothing out of the ordinary in all of my tests, that is until I got to use GPU Tweak 2 to overclock the card and play around with the available presets. This card comes with three presets: Silent Mode, Gaming Mode and OC Mode, though you can add your own custom profile. Silent mode does its job well, it keeps the card as silent as possible, though this does prevent the card from getting its max performance to keep the card cooler. I used this for low intensity gaming and movie watching and it was silent throughout my experience. Gaming mode is nothing impressive; it will allow you to handle most modern games at 1080p without a hitch, but the fan profile on this is mediocre and the card will throttle after a few hours of intensive gaming. The OC mode is lackluster; yes it does boost the card to a higher frequency (1999 MHz) than gaming mode(1974 MHz) but it's not by much, and it barely touches the power limit, resulting in frequent stutters in my benchmarks. The fan curve on this is the worst of the three modes, and the card throttled down quite a bit after just 1.5 cycles of Unigine Heaven. Where this card truly excels is in the custom profiles category: I managed to dial in a 2062 MHz overclock on this card, which throttled down to 2025MHz due to the power limit, though 2025Mhz on a 1060 is still nothing to scoff at. Adjusting the fan curve, power limit and voltage was very easy, and to make things easier, the power limit and temp target are coupled, so raising the power limit will automatically raise the temp target for you ass well. though at high rpm, these fans are very noisy, but not the loudest ones I've heard on a graphics card before. On a final note for this section, even though it seems I'm ripping this card a new one, its more me complaining about he quality of presets for this card. The card is advertised with a Boost Clock of 1806 MHz, and the fact that this card has 150 MHz OC presets that are(mostly) stable is amazing on its own. Overall, a 200+ MHz final overclock over the advertised boost is awesome.
Closing Thoughts:
This card is very good for its price, so set your expectations accordingly. Since I only purchased one of this card, I do not know whether I just got very lucky to have a very high quality GPU in mine or whether the GPUs in these cards are consistently of a very high quality,so I cannot say whether it will perform like a premium card every time. Regardless, I would recommend installing GPU Tweak II alongside this card and using it to get the max performance out of this card every time.
| Memory Speed | 1809 MHz |
|---|---|
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 |
| Chipset Brand | Nvidia GTX 1060 |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 6000 MB |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 1 |
