My son would like to upgrade his gtx 670 to a 1060. He plays at 1080p with no future plans to go any higher. The primary concern with choice of card is one that runs cool and quiet. Also I'm really unsure if he needs to go 6gb or not, 6 seems more future proof but not sure if it's worth him spending the extra 40 odd quid or not.
I've always been under the impression that the 480's run hotter and one of the prime reasons to upgrade his 670 is it's running quite hot hence the reason to go for the lower power using 1060. A quick look at anandtech 2016 you bench shows the 480 to be slower and seems to dearer too so I think I'll be sticking to the 1060 unless I'm reading it all wrong.
You should definitly buy the 6gb model. Some games even at 1080p will need that Vram. https://www.scan.co.uk/products/pal...phics-card-1280-core-1506mhz-gpu-1708mhz-boos Something like this, I own the 1080 version of the same card and have never saw it above 63c even in something like mass effect andromada. Fans do not turn on pre 50c so games like league of legends which use such low gpu demands the fans will not even spin. I have never heard the card over the standard system noise. Which is low enough for me to sleep with it on.
Holy crap that's cheap. I was hoping to buy from Amazon but that's to cheap to miss, how good are palit on rma's should anything go wrong?
Decided to go for the MSI armour in the end, quite a bit of a clock boost, fans don't kick in until 60c, £13 cash back making it only £8 dearer plus an extra years warranty. Thanks for pointing me towards scan though rollo or I probably would have missed it. My son did have to deliberate about the palit having RGB lighting though
No he was deliberating as that was a feature he really liked, he has an RBG keyboard and mouse already and wants the corsair RBG mouse mat.
As much as I was preaching this a month or so ago all of the good deals seem to have dried up - probably the added demand given how bad the 580 was.
For me, it's not so impressive when you have to ramp up the voltage so much to get it there: you lose out on noise and temperatures, and the added electricity bills will start to wipe out any value savings over the years. The 480 at it's lower pricing and better power efficiency seemed to be in the same ballpark as the 1060, to me. I bought one on the back of it!
Yeah, I really like the RX 480, I think it's a great card (especially in DX12/Vulkan games), but it was already embarrassed in performance per watt compared to Nvidia's offerings. The extra juice these 580 refreshes are using (for such little performance gains), combined with the price increase, tips the favour firmly back the the GTX 1060 imo... Especially considering the overclocking headroom a decent AIB version has (something no RX 480/580 can boast, unfortunately). If you can find a decent 8GB RX 480 (GTR/Gaming X/Strix) for under £200, that's about the best bang for buck you're gonna get nowadays.
I too am in the market for a card in this range. I almost pulled the trigger on this EVGA 1060 from Amazon, but the single fan is giving me doubts about heat/noise. Ultimately I'm looking for GTX 1060 (6gb) performance with a quiet, cool fan, but am having trouble distinguishing which version will do that best for the money. Maybe this MSI non-armour one instead?
That's the card we went for in the end. It's a little dearer than we paid now though. It is exceptionally quiet, fans don't even spin up until 60c, my lad has it setup with an afterburner fan profile though that spins the fans up to 30% from about 40c just to keep things a little cooler. His general max temp is around the 59c mark.
What does the ARMOR provide? Because I've now found the non-ARMOR variant available for £199, so will probably go with that unless you can convince me otherwise.
I'm not 100% sure on this so hopefully someone else will correct me if I'm wrong but I believe its regarding the cooling and the fact that the non armor doesn't have a zero fan speed option.
After a little digging around it does have a zero fan speed facility but the cooler is not quite as good as the armor plus the armor requires an 8 pin pcie connector whereas this card only needs a 6 pin so maybe it doesn't have quite the same overclocking potential. Non armor cooler need to scroll down a bit as it wouldn't let me link directly to the image. Armor cooler Taken from This review. Still looks like a good card for the money though.
