ASUS STRIX GAMING GTX 1060 Graphics Card Review

Final Thoughts

Price

At the time of writing, the ASUS STRIX GAMING GTX 1060 OC is available from Overclockers UK for £299.99 including delivery. This is one of the most expensive versions of the GTX 1060 although the price has dropped by £20 during the past week or so. Other premium models sporting a high factory overclock cost slightly less but the pricing difference isn’t as substantial as seen on ASUS STRIX GAMING GTX 1070 OC and ASUS STRIX GAMING GTX 1080 OC.

Of course, the reference design RX 480 cards can be acquired for around £239.99. Saying that, I’d recommend paying slightly extra for units with a custom cooler as the blower cooler struggles to maintain a stable boost clock. Once you begin looking at the custom RX 480s, it’s clear that the ASUS STRIX GAMING GTX 1060 OC costs around £40-£50 more. Whether this constitutes good value, depends on your budget. Although, £40-£50 can make a lot of difference in the lower pricing categories.

Overview

The timing of this review is a little unfortunate because the GTX 1060 3GB has just been released and acts as a direct competitor to the RX 480. Despite this, the GTX 1060 cards featuring a 6GB frame-buffer and slightly higher CUDA core count offer similar performance to AMD’s flagship Polaris 10 graphics solution and shouldn’t be compared to other products. Interestingly, the GTX 1070 is in a different league and provides a huge frame-rate boost which makes premium GTX 1060 models costing around the £300 mark seem expensive. If you’re lucky enough, it’s possible to obtain the GTX 1070 for £375 and many users will feel it’s worth the added investment. Evidently, those with a tight budget might not be able to stretch beyond £250 and this is where the RX 480 excels.

As you can see throughout the benchmarking process, the ASUS STRIX GAMING GTX 1060 OC didn’t enjoy a huge lead over the Sapphire Nitro+ RX 480 OC and fell behind when using the Vulkan and DirectX 12 APIs. To be clear, the performance is still worthy of praise but don’t expect a huge improvement compared to a highly acclaimed RX 480. The only substantial advantage occurred when running Rise of the Tomb Raider on a 1080p monitor but the huge gap quickly subsided once the resolution was increased to 2560×1440. For all the graphics card’s overclocked specification, it’s not got the required horsepower to classify the RX 480 as an inferior product. This means, if you’re not overly fussed with using an AMD graphics card, then the ASUS STRIX GAMING GTX 1060 OC might not be the most suitable option. However, it’s a solid performer and a decent entry point into 1440P gaming.

Aesthetically speaking, the ASUS STRIX GAMING GTX 1060 OC is marvellous and I’m really fond of the neutral, elegant styling. Instead of fixating on a polarising fusion of colours, ASUS opted for a matte black shroud and added customizable lighting through a number of cut-outs. These allow the light to flow through in an attractive manner and whichever colour you select, contrasts with the black finish extremely well. Unfortunately, the ROG logo on the backplate doesn’t have any kind of lighting support which detracts from the overall appearance. This is a crying shame because the illuminated ROG logo was one of the better aspects of ASUS’ GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 STRIX cards.

Overclocking any Pascal GPU involves realistic expectations and it’s exceedingly challenging to reach a hefty boost clock beyond those set by AIB partners, especially on extreme models. Rather surprisingly, the ASUS STRIX GAMING GTX 1060 OC had excellent overclocking headroom and the average boost clock surpassed 2100MHz. This is the first time I’ve experienced a perfectly stable clock speed above 2100MHz as it’s usually just a sudden spike which reaches this figure. Also, the memory overclocked pretty well which combines with the boost clock to improve performance by a few frames.

ASUS’ DirectCU III cooling hardware is exemplary and upholds a superb noise to performance ratio. In a similar vein to the ASUS STRIX GAMING GTX 1070 and ASUS STRIX GAMING GTX 1080, the graphics card is remarkably quiet when stressed and rarely exceeds 62C. This creates a stunning user-experience and I’m pleased to see the cooling apparatus hasn’t been scaled back on the GTX 1060 model.

Pros

• Brilliant cooling solution
• Extremely quiet
• Fantastic overclocking headroom
• Gorgeous RGB lighting
• Great performance up to 2560×1440
• Low power consumption
• Neutral aesthetic
• Staggering build quality
• Three-year warranty

Cons

• Expensive for a GTX 1060
• Falls behind RX 480 in DirectX 12 and Vulkan
• No RGB lighting on the backplate

“The ASUS STRIX GAMING GTX 1060 OC is ridiculously quiet, has loads of overclocking potential and performs brilliantly. Not only that, the product is built to an impeccable standard and offers a good alternative to AMD’s price to performance master, the RX 480.”

ASUS STRIX GAMING GTX 1060 OC Graphics Card Review

Thank you ASUS for providing us with this review sample.