GTX 1060 in 2020

It's 2020 and RTX is in full swing, yet the GTX 1060 is still the most popular and used card according to the Steam Hardware Survey. With that in mind, is it still worth going out of your way to go and buy a GTX 1060 or should you spend a little bit more money on the 1660 or 1660 Ti? You may have noticed I've done this video before only I got some really strange results mainly due to the fact that I didn't really know what I was doing as very early stages of benchmarking GPUs, but that was with Callum's MSI 1060 6GB. We are now using an EVGA SC 6GB which I got to borrow from my brother for a couple of days. Now this is slightly clocked higher than the standard 6GB and I do kind of, I really do need to make it known if you don't know already that you should buy the 6GB model if you're buying a 1060 because the 3GB whilst obviously having half the amount of RAM, it's actually known to be slightly lower performing and I mean the overall situation there is you kind of just don't bother with the 3GB, that's kind of known across the industry these days. So this card is the EVGA version, it comes with three DisplayPort connectors, one HDMI connector and one DVI connector. Now if you don't have a DisplayPort monitor, which pretty much all of them come with these days, then you are missing out because the DisplayPort is a brilliant connector and a brilliant cable. However, there is that one HDMI, but there's also something to note that if you've got an HDMI monitor and you're also streaming or using VR rather, then you're going to need two HDMIs or an active adapter which is something you're going to have to spend extra money on. It also, as you can see, is a very small card and uses one 6-pin 75W PCI power connector for the GPU, which is brilliant for those who have lower end power supplies that only come with one PCI connector. My brother's power supply is exactly like that, so when I lent him my 1080Ti for this video, he had to get an adapter to make it work. However, because it's newer and it's more power efficient than let's say the 600 series or the 500 series or the 400 series, which was when I was kind of starting to get into this kind of thing, you only really need like a 450-500W power supply if you're having a full GPU and maybe an i7 CPU and plenty of storage. Like, you really don't need as big a power supply as some people go out and buy, but with this, you know, you can probably fit it into a small form factor since the TDP really isn't that high either. Comparing it to the 1660Ti, which is the direct replacement, since the 1660 is more of a replacement for the 3GB model of this card in my opinion, and also comparing to the RTX 2060, it's fairly easy to see where the value for money prospect comes in. You've got a significantly cheaper card at around £140 versus £200 for the 1660Ti and £300 for the RTX 2060, and in return you're getting less performance. The 1660Ti handily outdoes the 1066 gig in most games, pretty much every game. It will gain between a 20% and 40% lead, which is not insignificant, that is a big jump in performance. However, you are paying that extra premium and a lot of these GTX 1060 6GBs can be bought cheap or used off the Facebook marketplace since they are kind of used mining cards as well. Now, you do have to worry a little bit about what kind of card you get, mainly because the bearings and the fans can go and that means you're going to have a louder fan. You can replace it if you want to replace the shroud or water cool it, but it's still not going to be pristine. So, it is worth kind of doing your due diligence when it comes to researching the cards, researching the that have coil whine. EVGA cards do tend to have a little bit more coil whine than every other card, however, they're a little bit more performancey and a little bit cheaper as well. My test bed, which I use for pretty much everything when it comes to benchmarking graphics cards, is my Gigabyte Z370 board with an 8700K in it, 32GB of RAM, and all the games are run off of a SATA-based SSD. Also, for this card in particular, I made sure that I tested on a 1080p monitor. The only other monitor I currently own is a 1440p wide ultra-wide, and I think that's a little bit too high of a resolution to really kind of test this card and it's what I would consider a normal condition, what generally people are going to be running. A lot of people will run a 1440p 16x9 monitor or they might run a 1080p ultra-wide, and I think that's the sweet spot. Actually, a 1080p ultra-wide is really good for a 1066GB. I ran games that had integrated benchmarks and I also ran FRAPS on games that didn't and did what I would consider a standard run. So in Doom, I kind of like did the entry level, on Apex I did as soon as I hit the ground to go in and collecting weapons, stuff like that, but I recorded it 60 seconds and took the average, the minimum and the maximum. What I'm going to do is let the benchmarks play with a little bit of music behind it and I'll catch up with you afterwards. So, who is this graphics card for? Well, I think it's for people who are just starting to get into PC gaming who are happy to buy used. You shouldn't buy one of these brand new because it's just a complete waste of money. Why would you buy this when you could buy the 1660 Ti for the same money brand new? It's a good graphics card. It uses a nice amount of power, so it's not crazy power hungry. You can also get these really small models which will fit into small ITX cases, which is brilliant for a HTPC. They're really good for that. They're also good graphics cards for anyone who wants to play majorly, I would even say AAA titles at 1080p high or 1080p ultra. A lot of games, in fact every game I ran here was at 1080p ultra, bar Assetto Corsa Competizione, which was 1080p at high, I believe, and they were all running like two times MSAA. Not maxed out on the anti-aliasing just for obvious reasons. As soon as you add maximum anti-aliasing, pretty much every card gets crippled. I would pair this thing with like a mid-range kind of i5, nothing crazy. If you're going to get a better i5 or a better i7, you're going to want to get a better graphics card to make use of that. It all depends on whether you're going for graphical fatality or you're going for speed and frames, because if you're going for speed and frames, this is brilliant. You just go and whack an i7 in there and you're going to get loads and loads of frames. Now, this is for someone I think who may play a lot of esports titles, but then also wants to play high-end stuff. I was running some racing sims in this benchmark suite and I found those to run just fine, which is surprising because a lot of racing sims in the past have had pretty awful optimization when it comes to performance, but now they're a lot better. My brother, who has the GPU, is running an i7-2600K. Brilliant CPU, one of my favorite CPUs from back in the day when I had mine. And Morgan, who has one of these, is using a mid-range i5 from the fourth gen. Same with Callum, who I know who has one of these. He lent the previous graphics card. So a lot of the people who have 1066 gigs are running those slightly older i7s, mid-range older i5s, and to be honest, they're just good enough. A lot of people think you really need an i7 or a Ryzen 7 to game, and that's absolutely not the case. You see a lot of these really higher-end YouTubers who are running these setups, and that's great for them because they've got the money or they've been given them for reviews and lent them for reviews and units like that. But with this, you just don't need a crazy CPU to run a GPU like this, and I think it shows in these benchmarks. And with that, it's about time for me to go. Thank you all so much for watching. Please do like, dislike, comment, and subscribe if you're new around here to an MMS video like this one. Also, check out all my social medias that will be in the link in the video description. Definitely on Twitter and Instagram, those are my two favorite places to really have interaction these days because I don't tend to interact much with the YouTube comments these days. I'm excited because I've got a lot of great content coming up, and hopefully you're excited too. So, I've been Ryan Thomas, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace.