NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB Graphics Cards Launched At $199
NVIDIA today added the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB graphcis card to their product lineup. This card is now the lowest priced graphics card with the latest ‘Pascal’ GPU architecture and will feature an MSRP that starts at $199 USD.
One might think that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB is just a GeForce GTX 1060 6GB with half the frame buffer, but it is a little more complicated than that. NVIDIA disabled one of the SMs on the GT 1060 3GB cards, so this new model has 1152 CUDA cores enabled on the GP106 GPU and they are running at a base clock of 1506 MHz and a boost clock of 1708 MHz. Thankfully, NVIDIA will not be allowing different frame buffer options for the different GPUs to ensure there is no confusion.
The 3GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 8 Gbps on a 192-bit bus. The TDP of this card remains the same as the GT 1060 6GB and that would be 120W. When it comes to performance our friends at NVIDIA told us that the GTX 1060 6GB is about 5% faster than the GTX 1060 3GB. They also happily informed us that the GTX 1060 3GB is roughly 10% faster than the AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB video card that has an MSRP of $249.
The GTX 1060 3GB will have an MRSP starting at $199 USD, and has the following recommended specs:
| Architecture | Pascal |
| CUDA Cores | 1152 |
| Base Clock | 1506MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1708MHz |
| Memory Speed | 8 Gbps |
| Memory Config | 3GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Interface | 192-bit |
| TDP | 120W |
NVIDIA expects retail availability over the next couple of weeks and there will be a new driver to support this card coming out later today. What is next for NVIDIA after the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB? The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 is coming sooner or later to replace the aging GeForce GTX 950 and to compete against the AMD Radeon RX 460 2GB/4GB video cads that are targeted to eSports players.