Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB Founders Edition Review

Nvidia's GTX 1060 Founders Edition comes beautifully presented – it's easy to see why consumers might opt to choose this version and buy direct from Nvidia – even when third party solutions may perform better and run faster.

Aesthetically there are similarities to be drawn with other Pascal-based Nvidia cards, though the GTX 1060 does vary in some subtle ways too.

Notably, it doesn't have a full cover backplate and the PCB is much shorter, with additional length added to the card beyond where the PCB stops. The total length of the card is around an inch shorter than that of the GTX 1070.

While the GTX 1070 had a Perspex window overlooking a vapour chamber cooler, the GTX 1060 gets a plastic cover that imitates the same look. Underneath that plastic cover is still a heatsink, though it isn't capable of displacing as much heat, nor does it need to, it isn't a vapour-chamber.

The more compact heatsink used inside is comprised of two copper heat pipes embedded into an aluminium heatsink.

The GTX 1060 draws power through a single 6-pin and conforms to a dual-slot form factor. The end of the graphics card is open to allow the blower-style fan to draw in air which is blown laterally through the heatsink and out the rear I/O.

Prospective buyers should note the omission of an SLI bridge since Nvidia has officially ditched both hardware and software support for multi-GPU configurations with the GTX 1060.

That rear I/O is well balanced and should suit most users' needs – HDMI 2.0b, three Display Port 1.3/1.4 ready and a DVI dual-link. VR users should note that Nvidia recently released a driver update. 368.81, that fixes compatibility problems with the HTC Vive when using Display Port.

On the subject of VR the results of Steam's VR benchmark on this card are very promising – a score of 8.2, equivalent to very high, when paired with our stock Intel Core i7 6700K. For reference the RX 480 8GB scored 6.6, a ‘high' category score, in our earlier tests.

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