Nvidia's new GTX 1060 is now available for purchase, and this is an affordable graphics card which many folks have been waiting for – after all, Nvidia claims it delivers no less than GTX 980-level performance. Which is pretty astounding for this relatively wallet-friendly step up from the 960.
But exactly how wallet-friendly is the GTX 1060? If you want the Founder's Edition of the card, you'll have to stump up $299 (around £225, AU$400), and you can only get this version directly from Nvidia's online store.
However, the vanilla flavor of the GTX 1060 is available from the usual online retailers, with a range of cards from different vendors sporting the usual array of overclocked models, custom cooling and so forth.
Over in the US, prices for these start at $249 – the EVGA GTX 1060 edition, Asus GTX 1060 Turbo Edition and Zotac GTX 1060 Mini 6G (the latter being a compact card designed to fit in a Mini-ITX case) all carry this price tag.
Stepping up
Asking prices then step up slowly towards the $300 mark, with PNY's GeForce GTX 1060 selling at $259. MSI's offerings also start at $259 – that will bag you the GTX 1060 Armor 6G OC, whereas the firm's top-end GTX 1060 Gaming X 6G will run to $289 – and Gigabyte's GV-N1060G1 Gaming-6GD is pitched at $289.
Mind you, the Asus Strix GTX 1060 6G Gaming is more expensive, and indeed at $329 it's more costly than the Founder's Edition.
Of course, most of these cards will be available from kick-off in the UK as well, and Ebuyer will certainly be carrying many of the aforementioned models, although not the PNY card, Asus Strix, or Zotac's compact 1060 Mini – although the retailer will be selling the Palit GeForce GTX 1060 Dualand GTX 1060 Super JetStream.
As regards the damage to your wallet this side of the pond, Ebuyer's prices will range from £240 up to over £300.
When it comes to the Asus Strix GTX 1060 6G Gaming, that has a recommended price of £325 and you can purchase it from all the usual online outlets (Scan, Overclockers UK, Amazon and so forth). The same goes for the other boards, naturally.
Core specs of the new GPU include a base clock of 1,506MHz (boosting to 1.7GHz), with 1,280 CUDA cores on board, 129GB/s of memory bandwidth, and a nicely frugal TDP of 120W.
It's also worth noting the GTX 1060 doesn't support SLI, and you'll need to step up to the 1070 if you're thinking of dabbling in some multi-card magic.
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