NVIDIA bolsters its mainstream offerings with the even cheaper GeForce GTX 1060 3GB
NVIDIA has announced the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, a slightly scaled down version of the 6GB card that costs just US$199.
MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X 3G. (Image Source: MSI)
In a quiet announcement last week, NVIDIA announced that it was expanding its stable of Pascal cards with the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, a new version of the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB that comes with half the video memory. The new model is priced at just US$199, making it an even more attractive option for those looking to save as many bucks as possible.
At that price, it also goes head to head with the AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB which costs the same. AMD may have traditionally been perceived as the budget option, but it looks like NVIDIA has no intention to let up on the pressure in any market segment.
However, VRAM isn’t all that the new GeForce GTX 1060 has had to trade away. For instance, it features fewer CUDA cores and texture units. Here’s a table comparing the key specifications of both cards:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB | |
CUDA Cores | 1152 | 1280 |
Texture Units | 72 | 80 |
ROPs | 48 | 48 |
Core Clock | 1506MHz | 1506MHz |
Boost Clock | 1709MHz | 1709MHz |
TFLOPs | 4.4 TFLOPs | 4.4 TFLOPs |
Memory Clock | 8Gbps GDDR5 | 8Gbps GDDR5 |
Memory Bus Width | 192-bit | 192-bit |
VRAM | 3GB | 6GB |
NVIDIA has scaled back the card’s capabilities by disabling certain functional units on the GP106 GPU. To be specific, the card actually ships with 1 SM disabled. Fortunately, other aspects of the GPU have not been cut away, and the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB retains the full ROP count and 192-bit memory bus.
The release of the new card also serves purposes other than make NVIDIA more competitive in the low-end of the market, and it actually opens up opportunities for NVIDIA to put salvaged GP106 chips to use instead of discarding them.
With that said, some may find the naming of the card a little misleading since it is a little less than a full-fledged GeForce GTX 1060 given the disabled SM. Ultimately, NVIDIA says all this amounts to around a 5 per cent performance hit, which isn’t too drastic. In fact, the company says the 3GB card is still 10 percent faster than the Radeon RX 480 8GB.
But unlike the 6GB version, NVIDIA isn’t making a Founders Edition model of the 3GB card. Custom versions of the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB are already shipping from NVIDIA’s partners.
Source: AnandTech
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