Specifications and Card Breakdown

Though Turbo is in the name, the card is basically a custom built, but stock speed, GTX 1060 from ASUS.

The flurry of retail built cards based on NVIDIA's new Pascal GPUs has been hitting us hard at PC Perspective. So much in fact that, coupled with new gaming notebooks, new monitors, new storage and a new church (you should listen to our podcast, really) output has slowed dramatically. How do you write reviews for all of these graphics cards when you don't even know where to start? My answer: blindly pick one and start typing away.

Just after launch day of the GeForce GTX 1060, ASUS sent over the GTX 1060 Turbo 6GB card. Despite the name, the ASUS Turbo line of GTX 10-series graphics cards is the company's most basic, most stock iteration of graphics cards. That isn't necessarily a drawback though – you get reference level performance at the lowest available price and you still get the promises of quality and warranty from ASUS.

With a target MSRP of just $249, does the ASUS GTX 1060 Turbo make the cut for users looking for that perfect mainstream 1080p gaming graphics card? Let's find out.

ASUS GTX 1060 Turbo Specifications

This part is simple enough; if you followed and read our review of the Founders Edition of the GeForce GTX 1060 then you are already familiar with the specs.

  GTX 1060 RX 480 R9 390 R9 380 GTX 980 GTX 970 GTX 960 R9 Nano GTX 1070
GPU GP106 Polaris 10 Grenada Tonga GM204 GM204 GM206 Fiji XT GP104
GPU Cores 1280 2304 2560 1792 2048 1664 1024 4096 1920
Rated Clock 1506 MHz 1120 MHz 1000 MHz 970 MHz 1126 MHz 1050 MHz 1126 MHz up to 1000 MHz 1506 MHz
Texture Units 80 144 160 112 128 104 64 256 120
ROP Units 48 32 64 32 64 56 32 64 64
Memory 6GB 4GB
8GB
8GB 4GB 4GB 4GB 2GB 4GB 8GB
Memory Clock 8000 MHz 7000 MHz
8000 MHz
6000 MHz 5700 MHz 7000 MHz 7000 MHz 7000 MHz 500 MHz 8000 MHz
Memory Interface 192-bit 256-bit 512-bit 256-bit 256-bit 256-bit 128-bit 4096-bit (HBM) 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth 192 GB/s 224 GB/s
256 GB/s
384 GB/s 182.4 GB/s 224 GB/s 196 GB/s 112 GB/s 512 GB/s 256 GB/s
TDP 120 watts 150 watts 275 watts 190 watts 165 watts 145 watts 120 watts 275 watts 150 watts
Peak Compute 3.85 TFLOPS 5.1 TFLOPS 5.1 TFLOPS 3.48 TFLOPS 4.61 TFLOPS 3.4 TFLOPS 2.3 TFLOPS 8.19 TFLOPS 5.7 TFLOPS
Transistor Count 4.4B 5.7B 6.2B 5.0B 5.2B 5.2B 2.94B 8.9B 7.2B
Process Tech 16nm 14nm 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm 16nm
MSRP (current) $249 $199 $299 $199 $379 $329 $279 $499 $379

Nothing changes with the ASUS GeForce GTX 1060 Turbo 6GB card, the speeds and feeds all remain identical when compared to the launch data. The GTX 1060 is the primary competitor to AMD's Radeon RX 480 8GB and 4GB cards, when available, and with 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 8 Gbps, 1280 CUDA cores and a 120 watt TDP, NVIDIA's GP106 GPU has a lot offer.

Since the launch of the 6GB version of the GeForce GTX 1060, NVIDIA did take the covers off of the 3GB version that has 128 fewer CUDA cores. That is not germane to the conversation at hand, but its worth pointing out that this card is NOT that.

A Look at the Card

So what kind of graphics card do you get for the MSRP price of the GeForce GTX 1060 these days? Honestly, it's not much to look at.

The black plastic shroud containing the blower fan on the ASUS GTX 1060 Turbo doesn't share any of the design or style of the other ASUS graphics card products, ROG or Strix, as it is built with budget and cost in mind. The silver stripes across the housing are fine, but this is a card that won't stand out at a LAN party in your windowed case.

The back is bare without a plate to hide the PCB or to protect the componentry. The GTX 1060 does not support SLI at all so the lack of the bridge connections is still a bit jarring for me.

Using a full length PCB and full cover shroud, the cooler is able to do the job it needs to do, keeping the GTX 1060 GPU running at around 79C under a full load at stock settings. It's not going to give you the low sound levels of something like the ASUS Strix product line, but it's not too far outside the bounds of something like the RX 480 reference and GTX 1070 Founders Edition.

ASUS has rotated the single 6-pin power connector 180 degrees from standard, so that the retention clip is facing up in a normal ATX system build. While I don't see the need for that rotation on its own, NOT having the clip be located in a way to be interfered with by the cooler housing is a plus.

Display support is different than the standard NVIDIA allotment. ASUS has gone with a single DL DVI connection, two DisplayPort and two full-size HDMI. The idea here is that users can keep an HDMI monitor connected while also connecting an HDMI VR headset like the Rift.

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