Disclosure: This review unit is supplied by Zotac.
Introduction
Earlier, I’ve reviewed the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 card, a lower-mid-end(?) graphic card that made a good impression as a gaming-grade component unlike the GTX 960. The founder’s edition GPU cooler did a good job for what it was worth. But when I saw that PCIe connector’s wiring- boy o’ boy!! Not that I believe it will be a problem. But it looks as if the GPU was put together in a hurry just in time to answer back AMD Radeon RX 480. AMD India wasn’t too kind to send the card to us, despite they were the ones contacting us a week before RX 480’s launch. In any case, the Nvidia’s gamble was in its
In any case, the Nvidia’s gamble was in its favour to a point that it was more of pricing war than a performance war. The GTX 1060 founders’ edition is not openly available like the GTX 1070 and the GTX 1080. You have to buy from Nvidia’s website which was a limited unit. Luckily, Nvidia has too many AIC partners than one wouldn’t bother to look beyond a few. Zotac is one of the few.
About the Zotac GTX 1060 AMP! Edition…
Zotac GTX 1060 AMP! Edition is a dual-slot, dual-fan design. The card is 8.26″ and its smaller than GTX 1060 FE whose length is 9.832″. The card looks compact enough to get inside older mini-ITX known to be cramped. AMP! Extreme always made a very good impression when it comes to cooling. Zotac GTX 1070 Extreme AMP! did a good job. Naturally, everyone will wonder how good is the AMP! Edition. Keep in mind that while the ‘founders edition’ has 1506/1683 MHz clock speeds, the ‘AMP! edition’ is clocked at 1556/1771 MHz out-of-the-box.
While the base clock’s 50 MHz might not be a big deal, the 88 MHz on the boost clock is pretty okay. With a better GPU cooler, chances are high that the boost clock should be more consistent compared to reference edition. This is excluding the potential to get stable boost clocks on load with manual overclocking.
Packaging
The packaging is good enough to protect the card. Nice to see Zotac did not cheap out on the GTX 1060’s packaging, despite its costing in Nvidia’s Pascal lineup. The contents are nothing to write home about, but it does include a sales pitch for Zotac sonix PCIe SSD card. Zotac provides a dual molex to 6 pin PCIe adapter which frankly is just a waste. A good case badge and caps for the PCIe interface, video outputs would have made a lot more sense. The Z company did not include an installation disk with this card. Cost cutting??
Graphics Card Design
The Zotac GTX 1060 AMP! Edition is a good looking card, with silver highlights on the shroud and exposed copper heatpipes. Naturally, the card looks way better than its founders’ edition and makes an impression it can provide better cooling (typically how most GPU makers do it). There are only two 8mm copper heatpipes on the card, which should be more than enough for a GTX 1060. However, it seems a bit odd not to see a backplate.
As we all know, there is no SLI interface on the GTX 1060. The card takes power from a six-pin PCIe connector. There is no lighting effects on the graphic card.
The GPU shroud and the heatsink array is a bit longer than the PCB.
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