In a very interesting find over in Asia new GeForce GTX 1060 video cards with GDDR5X memory have been spotted. We've mentioned them before. However as it now seems, they have been fitted with a GP104 GPU, and that's the one used on the GTX 1080. 

Here's the thing, these might defect,  reject or surplus chips, they then disable half of the cores and leave the working ones active. It's interesting though as the entire flash BIOS discussion would open up again, what if you inject an illegal firmware in there and would it be possible to get a fully working GP104 GPU? So the photos of a GTX 1060 / gddr5x have appeared on the Chinese market place Taobao . This clearly shows a GP104 GPU. The size alone already reveals that bit. 

A fully enabled GPU has 2560 shader cores, where the GTX 1060 has 1280, exactly half of them. This all also explains how NVIDIA can tie GDDR5X memory to the GPU opposed to regular gddr5. AIB Partners like Gigabyte and Palit GTX all presented 1060 video cards with gddr5x. It is likely that the new SKU was inserted to better compete with the Radeon RX 590, expected this week.