A Closer Look
During the past few reviews, I’ve criticised graphics card vendors who constantly fixate on a red and black colour scheme. This is because I’d prefer to see unique designs which spark lively discussion. Despite this, I’m still partial to the gaming-orientated red and black theme providing it’s been implemented in an elegant manner. Honestly, MSI’s Gaming series of GPUs continues to impress and makes this infusion of colours look surprisingly fresh. More specifically, the lightening accents and textured black section in the centre offers a really distinctive appearance. Not only that, the red shroud around of the fans and silver stickers featuring the MSI Gaming Dragon logo injects more colour into the graphics card. Overall, the sleek aesthetic is wonderful and should match a large number of custom builds.
The MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X incorporates a hefty matte black backplate which prevents unwanted droop and improves the graphics card’s appearance. Additionally, the stealth Gaming dragon is beautifully done and identifies the product’s gaming focus in a stylish way.
MSI’s Twin Frozr VI cooling solution is a staggering 20% cooler and 40% quieter than the previous iteration. This is a marvellous achievement since the Twin Frozr V design remains exceptionally capable and I’m thrilled that it’s been improved upon even further. An integral part of this success relies on the new Torx 2.0 high-angled fan blades which generate 22% more air fan pressure than their predecessor. The dispersion fan blade has a steeper curve which accelerates airflow. Also, each Torx 2.0 fan employs double ball bearings to enhance longevity and ensure RPM increases seem less audible.
As you can see, the aluminium heatsink features a dense fin array and an assortment of nickel-plated copper heat-pipes which disperse heat extremely well. Not only that, the smoothed square shape maximises heat transfer from the surface of the copper base. According to MSI, advanced aerodynamics directs more air directly onto the heat-pipes. Similarly, deflectors on the heatsink enlarge the surface area to lower temperatures. MSI have deployed a nickel-plated copper base plate and premium thermal interface material which showcases their attention-to-detail when tackling GPU load temperatures.
The MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X has a 6-phase power delivery, premium Japanese capacitors and super ferrite chokes. These components are used on a custom PCB which is reinforced by a rugged anti-bending strip. MSI even included memory cooling plates which help overclock the memory to a faster speed. The PWM heatsink is another useful addition although it lacks the micro-fins seen on the GTX 1080 model. Nevertheless, it’s still a wonderful PCB design and a vast improvement compared to NVIDIA’s stock configuration.
Unlike the Founders Edition which utilises a single 6-pin PCI-E connector, MSI has opted for an 8-pin to leverage extra overclocking headroom.
Here we can see the rear I/O houses three DisplayPort 1.4, a dual-link DVI-D connector and HDMI 2.0b.
Once powered on, the lightning bolts fire up in a red colour which creates a spectacular finish. This is an ingenious idea and I absolutely love the subtly of MSI’s LED implementation. Please note, I’m pretty certain this section can only light up in red but it’s not a huge issue since other colours wouldn’t really be suitable.
On the other hand, the MSI logo’s colour can be changed to suit your preferences and the branding remains stylish without being too extravagant. Of course, it’s possible to cycle between a number of transitional effects for the logo and lightning bolts including static, breathing, flashing, double flashing and random.
Why not Vulkan for Doom?
This is something I’m looking into for future reviews, wasn’t used because I’ve being doing some comparison with the older drivers and wanted to remove variables.
Thanks.
Because they don’t want to show that RX 480 beats the 1060 on doom.
Not at all, fi this was the case, why would I be so positive about the RX 480 in our review? It’s a simple reason which I’ve given below.
For the same reason they didn’t use the latest DX12 patch for Tomb Raider with Async Compute enabled, or the “Crazy” preset in Ashes of the Singularity. It would be damned hard to justify their “Editor’s Award” if they showed this card performing slower in 3 out of 5 tests than the £70 cheaper RX 480 with the reference design.
Making assumptions with no evidence about how the testing is done? I reduced the preset from Crazy to Extreme so the lower-end GPUs would be able to be able to achieve good figures at higher resolutions. If you look at some of the older reviews, I use the Crazy preset. I’m a little perplexed by your comments since I praised the RX 480 and didn’t just say go out and buy the GTX 1060. The RX 480 is still the price to performance winner and I’d recommend it. In fact, I’ve got a model from Sapphire coming and I’m expecting it to do really well. Honestly, it’s frustrating when comments like this are made, this no ultierior motive, I try to keep things fair.
its not assumptions really most of the reviewes didnt even used doom let alone vulcan
and even fewer actually didnt even tested dx12 games… tpu was the one that didnt even had a single non gameworks games
I see where you’re coming from and it’s often the case that games which do really well on AMD products are omitted. I try to find a balance between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 titles so that it’s fair. Also, we don’t always get codes from companies and I would have like to add them to the testing process. If Doom is used again, it would be with the Vulkan API.
How the testing was done:
1 – Not using Vulkan in Doom, which has been officially distributed through an official patch for 2 weeks and gives an unprecedented performance boost to AMD cards (not so much for nvidia ones)
2 – Not using the latest DX12 patch for Tomb Raider bringing Async Compute which was also officially distributed over 2 weeks ago and gives a sizeable performance boost to AMD cards (not so much for nvidia ones)
3 – Not using the Crazy preset in AotS even though you used it in other reviews, and then give the reason that “lower-end GPUs would be able to achieve good figures” even though the lowest-end model you’re putting in the comparison is a GTX 970 which
Why are you perplexed by my comment? Why would anyone?
The Crazy preset thing can be more or less subjective, but the other two are bound to raise suspicion, regardless of whatever your “true intentions” are.
Thanks for the response, I’ve decided to re-test all future Tomb Raider results using DX12, also will change the Ashes preset to Crazy. Unfortunately, I no longer have access to Doom due to a weird press code situation, so I’ll probably have to remove that test until another is provided. I didn’t use DX12 in Tomb Raider because it’s been horribly broken for some time, but judging by the comments, this has been resolved and it’s a great addition. Therefore, I’ll use it in the future.
I state in the review that the DX12 patch isn’t used because it has inconsistent results. However, I’ll research the latest patch to see if the situation has changed and if so, DirectX 12 will be adopted for all future reviews.
I like amd and would like to see ’em come out on top, but I’m also fair and would buya a green card if it has obvious advantage. Though some could see your benchmark set as nvidia biased, I dont understand how they can label you as unfair when your statements point otherwise, as if a review consist only of charts. Yours is one of the fairest review around, given the benchmark set. Having said that, it’s better if you include vulkan and async benchmarks in the future.
John, you can’t make everybody happy. If you said it was the best chocolate ice cream in the world and it’s free somebody would complain because you didn’t test vanilla. LOL. I thought it was a good review.
The AMD fanboys in this comment thread are the reason people hate reading comment sections. The editor even calmly and cooly replies to everyone trying to call him out for being some “Paid NVIDIA Shill” when he’s just doing his best to be as unbiased as possible given the available resources.
I just bought this card. I can’t wait to play some Witcher 3 and DOOM on it.
Still no parallel async .. WTF is nvidia doing?