Conclusion
Performance is in line with bigger boards, noise is kept down to a minimum and it's only a BIOS quirk that prevents the card from ticking all the right boxes.Now's arguably a good time to buy a graphics card in the £200-£300 region. New entrants from both AMD and Nvidia have entered this particular price bracket, resulting in much-needed competition and plenty of choice.
There's no clear winner between the GeForce GTX 1060 and Radeon RX 480, yet the former's efficient architecture is arguably better suited to compact cards that serve as an optimal fit for small-form-factor PCs.
Putting Nvidia's underlying 16nm Pascal GPU to good use, EVGA's SC Gaming serves the GTX 1060 on a 173mm-long board that's comfortably shorter than many of its immediate competitors. Performance is in line with bigger boards, noise is kept down to a minimum and it's only a BIOS quirk that prevents the card from ticking all the right boxes. The original software results in an unnecessarily loud fan, and while the update works a treat on Intel platforms, it's currently incompatible with AMD motherboards.
Bottom line: looking for a small, potent graphics card for a mini-ITX build? EVGA's GTX 1060 SC Gaming is definitely one to consider, but wait for the software bugs to be ironed out first.
The Good The Bad Compact form factor
Excellent at FHD, decent at QHD
Silent when idle and quiet under load
Good selection of outputs
Three-year warranty BIOS quirks still to be resolved
Stock-clocked memory
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The EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 SC Gaming graphics card is available to purchase from Scan Computers.
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