Synthetic Benchmarks
Before getting into in game testing I like to run through a few of the synthetic benchmarks to get a good look at how the different cards compare. In this case, I really only had my focus on a few cards that I have tested in the past. I wanted to see how the Aero compares to the GTX 1060 Founders Edition, the two GTX 1060 aftermarket cards previously tested, and then all of the RX 480s especially the XFX RX 480 that I recently tested with AMDs newest drivers. Before getting into that, though, let's check out the clock speeds on the different 1060’s.
Boost Clock / Base Clock
MSI GTX 1060 Aero ITX 6GB 1759 MHz / 1544 MHz
Zotac GTX 1060 6GB AMP! 1771 MHz / 1556 MHz
EVGA GTX 1060 Superclocked 1835 MHz / 1607 MHz
GTX 1060 Founders Edition 1708 MHz / 1506 MHz
The EVGA is still the highest clocked of all of the cards and it is also in the ITX form factor. The MSI 1060 Aero comes in just below the Zotac but still has a slight overclock over the Founders Edition card.
For my first set of tests, I ran through 3DMark Fire Strike using all three graphic settings that represent 1080p, 1440p, and 4k performance. I also tested using the newer Time Spy benchmark that tests DX12 performance. In all three Fire Strike benchmarks, the Aero came in just below the EVGA and above all of the RX 480’s and other GTX 1060’s. It even outperformed in Time Spy where it is obvious Nvidia has tuned their drivers a little more to keep the GTX 1060 up ahead of the RX 480.
In Unigine Valley Benchmark the results the Aero came out ahead of the other GTX 1060’s and RX 480’s once again with the next closest card being the GTX 980 or a pair of RX 470’s in Crossfire being ahead by 10 FPS.
Like in 3DMark, for Catzilla I tested at all three common resolutions. The results were about the same as what I’ve seen in the other synthetic benchmarks. The Aero trades blows with the EVGA 1060 and is once again higher than all of the RX 480’s.
Last but not least I wanted to check out the VR performance of the Aero GTX 1060. Here I tested with the SteamVR benchmark and I have also recently added the new VRMark benchmarks as well. In SteamVR it comes in with a health 8.3, putting the Aero GTX 1060 firmly in the good category for VR performance and above the other 1060’s and 480’s. The VRMark results are a little harder to tell because it is new and there are only a few results on the charts, but it did outperform the XFX RX 480 by a tiny margin. VRMark put the Aero GTX 1060 in the good range for the orange room test but the more demanding blue room test showed that there is still room for important if you plan on playing future VR games with more demanding graphics.
