The GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition & ASUS Strix GTX 1060 Review
by Ryan Smith on August 5, 2016 2:00 PM ESTOverclocking
For our final evaluation of our GTX 1060 cards, let’s take a look at overclocking.
We’ll start things off with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition. This card has a 3+1 power delivery system and a 116% TDP limit. Like the earlier GTX 1080 and 1070 cards, the GTX 1060FE can be “overvolted” to 1.093v to unlock an additional boost bin.
| GeForce GTX 1060FE Overclocking | ||||
| Stock | Overclocked | |||
| Core Clock | 1506MHz | 1706MHz | ||
| Boost Clock | 1709MHz | 1909MHz | ||
| Max Boost Clock | 1911MHz | 2100MHz | ||
| Memory Clock | 8Gbps | 9Gbps | ||
| Max Voltage | 1.062v | 1.093v | ||
We were able to overclock the GTX 1060FE’s GPU an additional 200MHz (12%), bringing the boost clock to 1909MHz. Unsurprisingly, this is very similar to the GTX 1080 and 1070, both of which overclocked by around 200MHz as well. Consequently it looks like both GP104 and GP106 seem to have similar voltage/frequency curves. Meanwhile we were able to push the memory another 1Gbps (13%) to 9Gbps.
Our other GTX 1060 is ASUS’s ROG Strix GTX 1060 OC. This card features a more advanced cooler and 6+1 power delivery system, but it also ships with a factory overclock. So all things held equal it’s likely that there’s not as much headroom for additional end-user overclocking. Meanwhile the card also ships with a built-in OC setting via ASUS’s GPU Tweak II software, which offers a small, virtually guaranteed overclock.
| ASUS Strix GTX 1060 OC Overclocking | |||||
| Stock | OC Mode | Overclocked | |||
| Core Clock | 1620MHz | 1646MHz | 1720MHz | ||
| Boost Clock | 1848MHz | 1874MHz | 1948MHz | ||
| Max Boost Clock | 2025MHz | 2050MHz | 2113MHz | ||
| Memory Clock | 8.2Gbps | 8.2Gbps | 9.2Gbps | ||
| Max Voltage | 1.062v | 1.062v | 1.093v | ||
As expected, due to its factory overclock the ASUS GTX 1060 doesn’t offer quite as much end-user overclocking. We were able to add another 100MHz (5%) to the GPU, half that of the stock clocked GTX 1060FE. Though it should be noted that in absolute terms the ASUS card has overclocked a bit farther than NVIDIA’s card, with a base clock 14MHz higher and a boost clock 39MHz higher. Meanwhile we got a slightly higher memory overclock out of the card as well, with the card topping out at 9.2Gbps, 1Gbps (12%) over the card’s shipping memory frequency.
The overall performance gains and resulting power/temperate/noise costs are about as expected. The additional overclock helps the performance of the GTX 1060, but it’s nowhere near enough to close the gap with the GTX 1070. Meanwhile the final overclocks of the NVIDIA and ASUS cards are close enough that their peak performance is neck-and-neck.
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Wall Street - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Yeah, it is amazing how many times the text "$249" appears in this review of a $299 card and a $314 card. Ryan is fully feeding into nVidia's price anchoring. I think that if the price chart shows $249 for the GTX 1060, then it should also show $299, because the $249 cards are nowhere to be found and explicitly not the ones he looked at.Ryan Smith - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
The entire Founders Edition things makes reviewing a bit more complicated. But since it's purely a stock card from a performance perspective, it's a very reasonable proxy for the $249 cards. No GTX 1070 is going to under perform the 1060FE, because that's the minimum specs allowed to begin with.Wall Street - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
With Turbo Boost, I am not 100% sure that the single fan Zotac or EVGA 1060s which are the actual $249 cards will maintain the same clocks as the founders edition will.Samus - Sunday, August 7, 2016 - link
What's depressing (for me anyway) is this card consistently outperforms my 970 in the games I play...and my 970 cost substantially more just a year ago. It's pretty unusual for a mainstream card to overtake an enthusiast card in one generation.Death666Angel - Sunday, August 7, 2016 - link
Well, this was a full node shrink (no half node) and a much more advanced process (FinFET), so unfortunately, it was very likely. However, you've had a good year of great performance out of your 970, so not too much to complain about there. :DSamus - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
True. The 970 will hold tight until I eventually graduate from 1920x1200 to 2560x1600.spbx - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
after anand left thing weren't the same :(BrokenCrayons - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
So true! There was a huge decline in the use of capital letters and punctuation by readers in the comments section.Cygni - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Yeah, the influx of the same terrible negativity posters from other websites has really been annoying lately.Morawka - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
That's what popularity and the reddit crowd will bring.