A closer look at GTX 1060

Nvidia is updating its Pascal series, a generation of visually appealing and good performing graphics cards. Newest in the series is the Geforce GTX 1060. It does not have the great power like the previously released the GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 graphics cards. But it looks similar to these two high end graphics cards.

There are some important differences in the cooler design between the GTX 1060 and the GTX 1080. Just to make it clear, the GTX 1070 and the GTX 1080 have the same cooler. Before we go into details let’s look at the GTX 1060 and the GTX 1080.

The GTX 1060 is 25cm long, which is ca. 2cm shorter than the GTX 1080.


If you look closer at the GTX 1080, you will notice one transparent window which reveals the heatsink underneath. With the GTX 1060 cooler we have an optical illusion, the window is not there, just textured surface, but it still looks nice and we can't complain.

The real difference is hidden at the back so it is important to compare both sides of the two cards. As expected the GTX 1060 comes with a shorter PCB.

The dual-slot cooler with blower fan looks like it should have no trouble keeping away the temperatures and noise emissions. 

 With the shroud removed we see two heatsinks, a bigger one for the GPU, and the smaller one which sits at the back to help the heat dissipation under the shroud.

The GPU heatsink looks bigger than it is. Have a look at the heatsink removed in the image below. It is big enough to ensure proper cooling for the GP106 GPU.

There is a bunch of cables below the shroud. As a pleasant surprise, one of them is powering an LED in the shroud, finally we have a glowing Geforce logo in a midrange segment graphics card.