MSI GTX 1060 GAMING X Review

Boasting the Twin Frozr 6 GPU cooling solution, GTX 1060 GAMING X promises to deliver an even cooler and quieter 1060 for gamers.

Product on Review: GTX 1060 GAMING X
Manufacturer & Sponsor: MSI
Street Price: UK: £299.99 GBP / US: $280

MSI are well-known within the computer tech industry as a dedicated graphics partner to both AMD and NVIDIA. Their portfolio of expertise reaches into motherboards and has recently even featured peripherals too. Fundamental to the brands success in the graphics arena has been their renowned Twin Frozr cooling solution and inclusion of Military Class components. Both these elements are present in today’s product under review.

Under our close eye today is the GTX 1060 courtesy of the GAMING X. This graphics card takes full advantage of a cooling overhaul by using the Twin Frozr 6 solution – promising to bring in benefits to both the temperatures and noise levels. MSI has also applied a factory overclock to this card bringing the GPU clock speed up to 1594MHz and the memory clock speed to 8.1Gbps. Will this offer us a significant advantage over the GTX 1060 Founder’s Edition?

About MSI

As a world leading gaming brand, MSI’s goal is to become the most trusted name in gaming and e-sport. We’ve dedicated countless hours and committed numerous resources to the eSports community to support the world’s most aspiring and best gamers and use their knowledge and expertise in our products in return. The insistence on 100% in-house design and manufacturing gives MSI the solid capability to implement innovative ideas and optimized design in our products.

Technical Specifications

Chipset
GeForce GTX 1060
Digital max resolution
7680×4320
Core Clock
Base: 1594MHz
Boost: 1809MHz
Memory Clock
8.1 Gbps
Process Technology
16 nm
CUDA Cores
1280
Memory Size
6GB GDDR5
Memory Bus
192-bit
Card Bus
PCI-E 3.0
Memory Type
GDDR5
DirectX
12
[n]OpenGL
4.5
PCB Form
ATX
Multi-view
4
I/O
1x Dual-link DVI-I
1x HDMI 2.0
3x Display Port 1.4
Suggested Power requirement
400W (8-pin external power connector)
Card Size
280mm x 127mm

Detailed Look & Video Review

For this review we’ve produced a video review over on our YouTube channel which details all of the included features, and takes a close look at the PCB/cooling solution along with the addition of some gaming benchmarks. Please check out our video review or hit play on the video below:

Test Setup & Methodology

How we test graphics cards

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

Hardware

Taking Intel’s High-End Desktop platform, our hardware utilises the Intel X99 chipset. Combined with this we use the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic and achievable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of DDR4 at 2666MHz and a 750GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

High End Graphics Cards on test:
ZOTAC GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme (NVIDIA 368.81)
ASUS STRIX GTX 1080 (NVIDIA 368.81)
Gainward GTX 1070 Phoenix Golden Sample (NVIDIA 368.81)
MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X (NVIDIA 368.64)
Gainward GTX 1060 Phoenix Golden Sample (NVIDIA 368.64)
NVIDIA GTX 1060 (NVIDIA 368.64)
NVIDIA GTX 980Ti OC (NVIDIA 368.81)
NVIDIA GTX 980 (NVIDIA 368.81)
NVIDIA GTX 970 (NVIDIA 368.81)
AMD Radeon RX 480 CrossFire (Crimson 16.7.2)
AMD Radeon RX 480 (Crimson 16.7.2)
XFX R9 FURY (Crimson 16.7.2)
AMD Radeon R9 390X (Crimson 16.7.2)

Special thanks go to Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:

Motherboard: MSI X99S GAMING 9 AC
CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition @ 4GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair LPX Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 2666MHz 16-17-17-35 C1
Power Supply – CORSAIR HX1050
Hard Drive – Samsung 840 EVO 750GB
Cooler – CORSAIR Hydro Series™ H105 240mm Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Monitor – AOC 28″ 4K U2879VF
Capture Card – Razer Ripjaw

Benchmarks
If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we’ve chosen:

DOOM (OpenGL 4.5 & Vulkan)
Total War: Warhammer
Rise of the Tomb Raider
HITMAN
DiRT Rally

To capture framerates we use a combination of in-game benchmark tools, FRAPS and PresentMon.

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included three of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

Unigine: Valley
Unigine: Heaven 4
Futuremark 3DMark Firestrike
Futuremark 3DMark Time Spy

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Power, Temperatures, Acoustics

To test for power consumption, we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Heaven 4.0 which was ran for 20 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.

Temperature

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests we set Heaven 4.0 running continuously for ~30 minutes recorded the peak/maximum GPU temperature.

Acoustics

Noise from the cooling fan isn’t disruptive at all, even under full load – take a look and listen on our video.

Overclocking

To overclock the GTX 1060 GAMING X we used MSI Afterburner Tool (4.3.0 Beta 4) since it gives extensive options for modifying the GPU and memory clock.

Overclocking the card was easy and we managed to boost the GPU and memory clock beyond the factory overclock applied by MSI. Our result took the GPU clock up to 1729MHz (1945MHz Boost). Pushing the card a little further meant we were able to receive a higher score in Unigine Heaven 4.0 which is shown below.

This is certainly a significant increase; therefore, others should be able to take advantage of a slight performance increase – without taking having a colossal effect on temperatures.

DX12: 3DMark Time Spy

With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, 3DMark Time Spy is the ideal benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards.

DX11: 3DMark FireStrike

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is Futuremark’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

DX11: Unigine Heaven 4.0

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

DX11: Unigine Valley

Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.

DX12: DOOM OpenGL 4.5

By default DOOM utilises an OpenGL 4.5 renderer, and is one of relatively few Windows PC titles to not use DirectX 12. It tests how well NVIDIA and AMD’s GPUs deal with a less mainstream approach, especially in regards to driver optimisations, and like all of id titles stretches graphics quality to the limit.

DX12: DOOM Vulkan

id have also released an optional Vulkan rendering path for DOOM. This API is a development of AMD’s Mantle low level which has been taken on board by the Kronos Group for implementation as the next generation of Open graphics APIs. Like DirectX 12 Vulkan is capable of Asynchronous Compute in specific configurations.

DX12: Total War: WARHAMMER

Total War: WARHAMMER is a pseudo Real-Time Strategy title which leverages DirectX 12 to render huge numbers of complex units on screen at any one time.

DX12: Rise of the Tomb Raider

Square Enix’s Rise of the Tomb Raider is the sequel to 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot. An enormously challenging title graphically, the developers also released an optional DirectX 12 render path for Windows 10 users. Although it has undergone a number of iterations this rendering pathway notably doesn’t currently utilise the full capabilities of DirectX 12.

DX12: HITMAN

Yet another DirectX 12 title, 2016’s Hitman from Square Enix and developer IO Interactive has a more robust DirectX 12 implementation than Rise of the Tomb Raider. We’ve tested at a full range of resultions, from 1080p through to 4K, which provides a look at the impact of GPU speed and memory utilisation.

DX11: DiRT Rally

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Value For Money

We make a simple calculation for this set of results. For each game we add all of the resulting FPS totals together and then divide by the four sets to give us an overall performance figure. While the figures alone do not give you an accurate picture of how the card will perform in any given scenario, they do tell you, when averaged, which GPU is the more capable across all of the benchmarks and settings tested.

Conclusion

It goes without saying, the GTX 1060 is now the graphics card to own for mid-range gaming. Following NVIDIA’s launch, gamers can now enjoy gaming at 1080p at an acceptable price-point. The Founder’s Edition with its reference cooler offered up a competitive solution so can the might of MSI’s Twin Frozr 6 improve on things?

The Twin Frozr cooling solution has been with us throughout many NVIDIA generations and MSI has given the GTX 1060 special treatment by attaching their sixth iteration – Twin Frozr 6. This cooler will shift GPU temperatures down to around 7-10C lower than the Founders Edition while maintaining low noise operation; something which will be a significant concern for many users. Built into the cooler is an LED lighting system which can be modified via MSI’s Gaming App, but if flamboyance isn’t your thing these can be completely disabled.

GAMING X offers good performance in DX11 and DX12 titles and as pointed out in our NVIDIA FE review, 1080p is the sweet spot for this card. Bearing a factory overclock we would have liked to see a bigger performance increase over the reference design but rest assured, there is still plenty of headroom to nudge those frequencies up even more, beyond the factory overclocks. Thanks to the Military Class components and 8-pin PCI Express connection over the original 6-pin, all of the ingredients are there for a modification, should the user desire.

The GAMING X is marginally more expensive than the FE but we believe the extra cost is well worth it considering the superior cooling solution. This card is priced at £299 GBP / $280 USD and is backed by an attractive 3 years’ warranty plus a 2 year license of XSplit Gamecaster/Broadcaster.

If you’re planning to upgrade from a previous generation, the MSI GTX 1060 GAMING X is a brilliant graphics card for 1080p needs. Thanks to the Twin Frozr 6 cooling solution, temperatures are impressive and noise is significantly reduced!

VIDEO REVIEW – VORTEZ TV

Pros
+ Attractive to the eye
+ Customisable LED lighting
+ Comes with factory overclock
+ Low-noise
+ Effective cooling
+ Overclocks even further
+ Good performance
+ DirectX 12 ready
+ 3 years’ warranty
+ 2 year XSplit license

Cons
– Marginal performance gains over Founders Edition
– medicore factory overclock

Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.