GeForce GTX 1060 Review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase

Let's start with our photo-shoot. A few pages that show the ins and outs with photos, all taken with an in-house photo-shoot of course.

So as you can see, the GeForce GTX 1060 is looking quite a bit like the previous models, again a similarly fashioned cooler is being used. For the Nvidia 10 series however there are subtle changes in aesthetics, with the cooler shell showing triangles (the base unit for render polygons/objects/scenes), some will love and some will dislike that nickel alloy based cooler shroud. There's a green LED in the top side fan housing (controlled with GeForce Experience) and the 1060 is displayed in chrome. These coolers are now offered as a premium solution, yes... it's a founders edition. The heatsink shell is made from cast aluminum and an injection molded magnesium alloy. This is a good conductor of heat, plus it helps out with isolating noise. And preventing noise for this product was key for Nvidia. Obviously you'll see a gazillion board partner cards with their own designs in PCB, cooling and tweaking. The Founders Edition is just this, the reference card as shown above with stock clocks but with a proper cooler.

The GeForce GTX 1060 is your standard dual-slot solution product, its cooling is vapor chamber based. The fan is outfitted with a special chrome'ish design, its airflow is carefully directed to take in air from the PC and exhaust it outside the PC, in order to optimize cooling efficiency while minimizing noise causing restrictions. Each 1060 will have a maximum power design of roughly and only... 120 Watts. Fear not, these are made to overclock as well. As such, Nvidia is using just one 75 Watts 6-pin PEG (PCI Express Graphics) connector. Another 75 Watts is delivered though the PCIe slot and thus motherboard. 

As you can see, a no backplate. The opinions on backplates differ per person. Of course they protect the backside of the PCB and its components, but backplates can also easily trap heat. GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition will offer five display connectors; you'll spot three DisplayPort connectors, one full size HDMI connector and one DL-DVI connector.

The GeForce GTX 1060, 1070 and 1080 are DisplayPort 1.2 certified and DP 1.3/1.4 Ready, enabling support for 4K displays at 120 Hz, 5K displays at 60 Hz, and 8K displays at 60 Hz (using two cables). The GeForce GTX Pascal based Founders Edition cards include three DisplayPort connectors, one HDMI 2.0b connector, and one dual-link DVI connector.