Final Thoughts
Price
The ASUS Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 OC 6GB 9Gbps Graphics Card is expensive, coming in at £324.99. This is about £40 more than the normal GTX 1060 that’s already on the market, and you can pick up the standard memory model with a triple fan cooler for £289.98. Yes, it is a more expensive, but it is faster and more compact that the other model, so it’s certainly priced to reflect this. That does have one side effect that it’s priced close to the GTX 1070 too, so best to shop around for the best deals on each to compare.
Overview
The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 is already one of the best mid-budget cards on the market. In all fairness, it is also one of the most expensive mid-budget cards on the market with stiff competition from the more affordable RX 580, but for the most part, it does offer faster performance that helps justify some of the cost. It’s also a much newer chipset than the rival AMD offerings, which means the Nvidia cards run much cooler and uses considerably less power overall, which can bring long-term savings dependant on your usage.
The build quality on this card is impressive, with a thick heat sink design that spans the full-size of the card, and four large heat pipes that do an excellent job of shifting heat from the GPU, memory and other hardware. Using an oversized cooler also plays no small part in this card being able to run passively, and even when running benchmarks all day, I found it took quite a while before the fans would start; this is great news for those who want a quiet system. Even when the fans are spinning, they’re surprisingly quiet, showing the benefits of aftermarket cooling solutions vs the stock Nvidia blower design.
The price is high, but when you look at the fact it comes with faster memory which can be overclocked even further; which we’ve already proven today can deliver improved performance, as well as VR friendly HDMI ports, a decent factory overclock, 0db Fan, Auto Xtreme Technology, and more, all of which add value for money, overall.
What impressed me more was that there was still some overclocking headroom left on the card too, and that faster memory had no issues being overclocked by another 250 MHz, and there were a few gains to be found on the GPU Core Clock too.
Pros
- Excellent gaming performance
- Improved overclocks
- New and faster 9Gbps memory
- 0dB Cooling
- Compact design
- Good overclocking
- Ideal for 1080/1440p gaming
Cons
- Priced quite close to some of the GTX 1070’s
Neutral
- One of the most expensive GTX 1060’s available, but also one of the fastest.
“The ASUS GeForce GTX 1060 OC 9Gbps is one of the fastest GTX 1060’s on the market today, offering blazing performance for 1080 and 1440p gaming while offering great efficiency and build quality.
