Review: EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 SC Gaming 3GB

Introduction

The market for graphics cards priced at £250 has been hotting up since both AMD and Nvidia released GPUs based on their latest architectures. AMD has been more eager to pinpoint the sub-£200 market with two GPUs - the Radeon RX 480 and Radeon RX 470. Specifically, if you can find one, the Sapphire RX 480 Nitro 4GB is arguably the best card south of this all-important figure.

Whilst the performance-comparable Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB is already out in the wild, the aggressive pricing of the two aforementioned Radeons puts the green team into a tight spot of sorts. It has countered by quietly enabling its cohort of partners to release the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, available for under £200.

Sensible move, right? Strip away half the memory and release a cheaper card to stave off the obvious threat from AMD. Not quite, because as you may have heard, the 3GB variant of the Pascal-based card loses more than half its memory.

Analysis

The obvious difference, other than half the memory, is the fewer shaders on this model. Note that GTX 1060 3GB drops its allocation from the 1,280 to 1,152, meaning that one of the GP106's 10 SM units has been switched off. The reasons for this are manyfold: Nvidia may feel that simply releasing a card with 3GB of memory does little to differentiate performance from its sibling; the yields may be such that a far greater proportion of GP106 dies operate with 1,152 cores, or it may be the case that there was no other easy way to offer a different bang-for-buck ratio.

However it is cut, the 3GB card, operating at the same core and boost frequencies and memory speed, is likely to be around five-to 10 per cent slower than the 6GB part. Of equal interest is the price, starting at $199 (£179), so matching the area currently occupied by the RX 470 and RX 480 4GB cards.

As this is not a full-core part, Nvidia is not releasing a Founders Edition - all cards are to be built by partners using whatever cooling they best deem fit for this 120W GPU. Our feeling is that GTX 1060 FE is ripe for a small card with minimal cooling, though Far Eastern partners usually ignore such advices and go for the biggest, baddest coolers they can find; those commonly used on the GTX 1080-class of GPUs.

So, half the memory and 10 per cent fewer cores are the key traits of the GTX 1060 3GB. Let's now see how EVGA takes Nvidia's newest GPU and runs with it.