ASUS GeForce GTX 1060 Turbo 6GB Graphics Card Review – PC Perspective

Specifications and Card Breakdown

Though Turbo is in the name, the card is basically a custom built, but stock speed, GTX 1060 from ASUS.

The flurry of retail built cards based on NVIDIA’s new Pascal GPUs has been hitting us hard at PC Perspective. So much in fact that, coupled with new gaming notebooks, new monitors, new storage and a new church (you should listen to our podcast, really) output has slowed dramatically. How do you write reviews for all of these graphics cards when you don’t even know where to start? My answer: blindly pick one and start typing away.

Just after launch day of the GeForce GTX 1060, ASUS sent over the GTX 1060 Turbo 6GB card. Despite the name, the ASUS Turbo line of GTX 10-series graphics cards is the company’s most basic, most stock iteration of graphics cards. That isn’t necessarily a drawback though – you get reference level performance at the lowest available price and you still get the promises of quality and warranty from ASUS.

With a target MSRP of just $249, does the ASUS GTX 1060 Turbo make the cut for users looking for that perfect mainstream 1080p gaming graphics card? Let’s find out.

ASUS GTX 1060 Turbo Specifications

This part is simple enough; if you followed and read our review of the Founders Edition of the GeForce GTX 1060 then you are already familiar with the specs.

 
GTX 1060
RX 480
R9 390
R9 380
GTX 980
GTX 970
GTX 960
R9 Nano
GTX 1070

GPU
GP106
Polaris 10
Grenada
Tonga
GM204
GM204
GM206
Fiji XT
GP104

GPU Cores
1280
2304
2560
1792
2048
1664
1024
4096
1920

Rated Clock
1506 MHz
1120 MHz
1000 MHz
970 MHz
1126 MHz
1050 MHz
1126 MHz
up to 1000 MHz
1506 MHz

Texture Units
80
144
160
112
128
104
64
256
120

ROP Units
48
32
64
32
64
56
32
64
64

Memory
6GB
4GB
8GB
8GB
4GB
4GB
4GB
2GB
4GB
8GB

Memory Clock
8000 MHz
7000 MHz
8000 MHz
6000 MHz
5700 MHz
7000 MHz
7000 MHz
7000 MHz
500 MHz
8000 MHz

Memory Interface
192-bit
256-bit
512-bit
256-bit
256-bit
256-bit
128-bit
4096-bit (HBM)
256-bit

Memory Bandwidth
192 GB/s
224 GB/s
256 GB/s
384 GB/s
182.4 GB/s
224 GB/s
196 GB/s
112 GB/s
512 GB/s
256 GB/s

TDP
120 watts
150 watts
275 watts
190 watts
165 watts
145 watts
120 watts
275 watts
150 watts

Peak Compute
3.85 TFLOPS
5.1 TFLOPS
5.1 TFLOPS
3.48 TFLOPS
4.61 TFLOPS
3.4 TFLOPS
2.3 TFLOPS
8.19 TFLOPS
5.7 TFLOPS

Transistor Count
4.4B
5.7B
6.2B
5.0B
5.2B
5.2B
2.94B
8.9B
7.2B

Process Tech
16nm
14nm
28nm
28nm
28nm
28nm
28nm
28nm
16nm

MSRP (current)
$249
$199
$299
$199
$379
$329
$279
$499
$379

Nothing changes with the ASUS GeForce GTX 1060 Turbo 6GB card, the speeds and feeds all remain identical when compared to the launch data. The GTX 1060 is the primary competitor to AMD’s Radeon RX 480 8GB and 4GB cards, when available, and with 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 8 Gbps, 1280 CUDA cores and a 120 watt TDP, NVIDIA’s GP106 GPU has a lot offer.

Since the launch of the 6GB version of the GeForce GTX 1060, NVIDIA did take the covers off of the 3GB version that has 128 fewer CUDA cores. That is not germane to the conversation at hand, but its worth pointing out that this card is NOT that.

A Look at the Card

So what kind of graphics card do you get for the MSRP price of the GeForce GTX 1060 these days? Honestly, it’s not much to look at.

The black plastic shroud containing the blower fan on the ASUS GTX 1060 Turbo doesn’t share any of the design or style of the other ASUS graphics card products, ROG or Strix, as it is built with budget and cost in mind. The silver stripes across the housing are fine, but this is a card that won’t stand out at a LAN party in your windowed case.

The back is bare without a plate to hide the PCB or to protect the componentry. The GTX 1060 does not support SLI at all so the lack of the bridge connections is still a bit jarring for me.

Using a full length PCB and full cover shroud, the cooler is able to do the job it needs to do, keeping the GTX 1060 GPU running at around 79C under a full load at stock settings. It’s not going to give you the low sound levels of something like the ASUS Strix product line, but it’s not too far outside the bounds of something like the RX 480 reference and GTX 1070 Founders Edition.

ASUS has rotated the single 6-pin power connector 180 degrees from standard, so that the retention clip is facing up in a normal ATX system build. While I don’t see the need for that rotation on its own, NOT having the clip be located in a way to be interfered with by the cooler housing is a plus.

Display support is different than the standard NVIDIA allotment. ASUS has gone with a single DL DVI connection, two DisplayPort and two full-size HDMI. The idea here is that users can keep an HDMI monitor connected while also connecting an HDMI VR headset like the Rift.