MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Aero ITX Review - Introduction

MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Aero ITX 6GB
Excellent gaming performance on a true 17cm form factor

We'll review the petite and tiny MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Aero ITX (6GB). Aimed at the small form factor DiY PC gamer, this somewhat budget graphics card launches at roughly 249 USD, the smallest GTX 1060 you'll have seen and the most silent we have tested of all 6GB versions. We test the 17cm long MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Aero Mini-ITX graphics card. The product does not vary much from any other 1060 other than its size. 

This GeForce GTX 1060 is once again based on Pascal, fabbed on a 16 nm node with fins baby. As it turns out, the smaller 16 nm FinFET fabrication process works out really well for Nvidia. Nvidia definitely stepped it up as cooling wise we do not see the cheaper plastic designs, the 1060 will receive something similar to the 1070/1080 founder edition cooler as well. The GeForce GTX 1060 might have the GP106 GPU housed on its PCB. Where the GeForce GTX 1080 has 2,560 shader processors and the GeForce GTX 1070 has 1,920 shader processors, the GeForce GTX 1060 has 1,280 (6GB) / 1,152 (3GB) of them. This means it has 9 (3GB model) or 10 (6GB model) SMs active (10 streaming multi-processors x (2x64) 128 shader cores). The cards will be equipped with properly fast memory as well, you can typically choose either a 3GB or 6GB model, though we do recommend the 6GB model to be a bit more future proof. That memory is tied to a 192-bit wide bus locked in at 2,000 MHz which is 8 GHz (GDDR5-effective) at a memory bandwidth of 192 GB/s. 

 
MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Aero ITX with the Nvidia GP106-A1 GPU ( 1,544 MHz base / 1,759 MHz boost / 8 GHz memory )