NVIDIA's GTX 1060 has beaten the AMD Radeon RX 480 with just the reference cards and the custom partner AIB variants are starting to pop up such as the ASUS ROG Strix GTX 1060 OC.
Custom cards usually end up being more powerful and less expensive than the reference or Founders Edition cards from NVIDIA and the GTX 1060 cards are not an exception. The Founders Edition card can already beat the RX 480 and the custom cards are expected to bring even more pain for AMD's Polaris 10 card.
One of the leading contenders in the custom cards is the ASUS ROG Strix GTX 1060 OC edition which, as the name suggests, comes factory overclocked. More PC builders have chosen the STRIX variant even for the GTX 1070 and the GTX 1080 because of its cooler build quality and high overclocks.
The ASUS Strix GTX 1060 OC edition has a core clock of 1620 MHz and boost clock of 1848MHz which translates to about an eight percent increase compared to the NVIDIA Founders Edition, HEXUS has learned. Even the 6GB GDDR5 memory bandwidth is overclocked to 8208MHz from the core clock 8008MHz in the reference edition.
For those who would like a smaller card for their mini ITX build, EVGA has their single ACX 2.0 fan GTX 1060 version which only has half of the length of the other custom cards. Of course, it would have a smaller headroom for overclocking but the GTX 1060's performance over the RX 480 may be enough of a factor for those who are building budget gaming PCs.
MSI also has their GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X (OC Mode) which has a factory overclocked boost frequency close to the Strix at 1809MHz from a core clock of 1594MHz, Anandtech reported. It also has 8.1Gbps for the bandwidth of the 6GB GDDR5 memory which is a little less than the ASUS ROG Strix but the difference could be negligible.
All of the custom cards have an edge over the RX 480 and even with AMD's partner cards as well. The ASUS ROG Strix GTX 1060 Gaming edition seems to be the most expensive one at $329 while the MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X (OC Mode) sits at second place at just $289 with a little bit of a difference in the specs.