The NVIDIA GTX 1060 3GB Review

Overclocking Results

Overclocking the GTX 1060, regardless of whether it’s a 3GB or 6GB card, has proven to be a challenge in the past and this time was no different with one exception: the GDDR5 on this card had the most headroom of any 1060 to date. Will that translate to other 3GB versions? I have absolutely no idea but the lower amount of load on the memory controller could be a contributing factor to slightly higher memory OC headroom. One other thing to note is that I didn’t experience one iota of difference between the Reference and SC BIOS on this card in terms of achievable clock speeds.


Core clocks on this particular sample topped out at a consistent 2037MHz which is just shy of what the Founders Edition hit a few months ago. All things considered that’s not all that much of an improvement over the 1800MHz to 1900MHz this card achieved without any overclock whatsoever. As you can imagine, that speed was capped by the voltage which, even with EVGA’s excellent Precision software, works on a nebulous sliding scale of 0 to 100. Memory on the other hand did hit an impressive speed of just over 9Gbps.

With such a limited core overclock, one other thing becomes apparent as we move towards the in-game results: these cards aren’t bottlenecked by their memory speed. Despite a 1GHz GDDR5 overclock the amount of additional performance that can be squeezed out of the GTX 1060 3GB is minimal at best unless you get one that allows for substantially higher engine clocks.