Yea, I'm glad to see that nVidia seems true to their word that the GTX1060 delivers 980-performance at a lower price and less power consumption.

This might be a good time for me to jump ship from AMD to Nvidia.

More reviews at www.guru3d.com. What I'm excited about is almost 3x the performance of my 750Ti at the same power level (recommended 400W PSU). If I upgrade the 750TI, then I can move it into my XP machine to replace the 8800GTX. That will be another 3x performance improvement with probably half the power consumption. 😀

Seems to use about 40 watts more than 750Ti, I would like to use a gpu without power connector so waiting for 1050(Ti)

Yeah, but 40W is pretty minor for a graphics card that is almost 3x faster. It still is in the same power category at least (400W) so wouldn't require a PSU upgrade and would work in lots of OEM systems.

You bring up a good point...I wonder what the fastest graphics is that only uses power through the slot?

clueless1 wrote:

You bring up a good point...I wonder what the fastest graphics is that only uses power through the slot?

My guess is the 750Ti.
That's a Maxwell-based chip, which has excellent performance-per-watt.
The 900-series does not seem to have any cards at < 75W, they all require a power connector (lowest is 950 at 90W), so the 750Ti is the 'newest' you can get.
We'll have to wait and see if there will be any Pascal-based cards that are PCI-e slot powered only.

My 750Ti does have a 6pin power connector. I remember when I was shopping for it, it was hard to find one that didn't have an external power connector, even though that was a big feature that was touted when it came out.

I think Asus made GTX 950 cards with no power connector, but that was too small upgrade from 750Ti in my opinion. I have an Asus 750Ti which I bought because of VGA connector on the card, I like to sometimes use my old crt on my main PC too. And it doesn't have the additional power connector. Kinda offtopic, but i cannot understand why the manufacturers ever even bothered adding one, since most 750Ti's are bios limited to under 40 watts power limit.

Aideka wrote:

Kinda offtopic, but i cannot understand why the manufacturers ever even bothered adding one, since most 750Ti's are bios limited to under 40 watts power limit.

For overclocking, I guess.
I wonder if you can leave it unconnected. I know that most cards that NEED the extra power will either not boot up at all, or will run in some kind of reduced performance mode, and give you some warning when the power is not connected.

Scali wrote:

For overclocking, I guess.
I wonder if you can leave it unconnected. I know that most cards that NEED the extra power will either not boot up at all, or will run in some kind of reduced performance mode, and give you some warning when the power is not connected.

Overclocking might be an answer, if even the cards with additional 6 pin connector didn't mostly have the ~40 watt bios. Even with that restricted bios I have mine running at +200MHz on both core and memory. Some bitcoin mining site did tests and found out, that setting the max power limit to 75 watts even without overclock gave boost in mining though.

Aideka wrote:

Overclocking might be an answer, if even the cards with additional 6 pin connector didn't mostly have the ~40 watt bios.

The BIOS doesn't matter though?
Yea, it matters for the clocks used at bootup, but once your driver is loaded, it will override the settings.

Scali wrote:

Aideka wrote:

Overclocking might be an answer, if even the cards with additional 6 pin connector didn't mostly have the ~40 watt bios.

The BIOS doesn't matter though?
Yea, it matters for the clocks used at bootup, but once your driver is loaded, it will override the settings.

As far as I know, it matters in Windows too, some cards may let you rise the power target on some overclocking software, but atleast the 750Ti's that I have seen do not allow that at all and the max is 100%. For example, I ran Furmark on my gpu on stock bios, was hitting power limit all the time, and clocks didn't rise, then I used an modded bios, didn't hit power limit and clocks rose to max boost clock. both are with same OC settings.

I always find it interesting how people just fap off about the performance without ever taking a good look at the hardware first especially with the reference cards. Cheap three phase vrm that is down to just the bare minimum is going to cause a lot of grief once these reference cards start failing. Just comes to show that with each new generation of hardware people forget absolutely everything and never learn after the fact.

Wait for third party versions of this card before buying! A single mosfet per phase never ends well especially when the phases have been cut down to reduce cost and clearly Nvidia went all or nothing on the cooler to boost sales.

Scali wrote:

Aideka wrote:

Kinda offtopic, but i cannot understand why the manufacturers ever even bothered adding one, since most 750Ti's are bios limited to under 40 watts power limit.

For overclocking, I guess.
I wonder if you can leave it unconnected. I know that most cards that NEED the extra power will either not boot up at all, or will run in some kind of reduced performance mode, and give you some warning when the power is not connected.

If you can get 120w from the slot but we all know that doesn't work, 1060 pulls 120w at stock clocks.

nforce4max wrote:

I always find it interesting how people just fap off about the performance without ever taking a good look at the hardware first especially with the reference cards. Cheap three phase vrm that is down to just the bare minimum is going to cause a lot of grief once these reference cards start failing. Just comes to show that with each new generation of hardware people forget absolutely everything and never learn after the fact.

Is that so?
I would think that as GPUs have become less powerhungry over the years, the VRMs are also less critical.
Aside from that, when nVidia introduced Pascal, they made a big fuss about the 'craftsmanship', how they optimized the GPU to have very minimal peak-to-peak voltage: https://youtu.be/VipvF26XRNY?t=9m14s
So that implies that because they 'cleaned up' the GPU itself, the VRMs and caps on the board don't have to work as hard.

nforce4max wrote:

If you can get 120w from the slot but we all know that doesn't work, 1060 pulls 120w at stock clocks.

We were talking about the 750Ti though, which is only 60W TDP. So it is designed to run from just a PCI-e slot. However, most 750Ti's are custom-designed, with an additional power connector. Which it doesn't really need.

Scali wrote:

Is that so? I would think that as GPUs have become less powerhungry over the years, the VRMs are also less critical. Aside from […]
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nforce4max wrote:

I always find it interesting how people just fap off about the performance without ever taking a good look at the hardware first especially with the reference cards. Cheap three phase vrm that is down to just the bare minimum is going to cause a lot of grief once these reference cards start failing. Just comes to show that with each new generation of hardware people forget absolutely everything and never learn after the fact.

Is that so?
I would think that as GPUs have become less powerhungry over the years, the VRMs are also less critical.
Aside from that, when nVidia introduced Pascal, they made a big fuss about the 'craftsmanship', how they optimized the GPU to have very minimal peak-to-peak voltage: https://youtu.be/VipvF26XRNY?t=9m14s
So that implies that because they 'cleaned up' the GPU itself, the VRMs and caps on the board don't have to work as hard.

Less critical lelelelel experience says otherwise, just comes to show people do not learn from the past at all even if the quality of the components are good they are still not enough in the long run unless you consider the cards to be disposable once the warranty expires. 120w is still 120w on a 3+1 design with only 4 mostfets to handle the load in the long run it only takes one powering the gpu to fail and the rest won't cope.

I really despise where things are going with modern hardware being so disposable.

I really like the look for that EVGA card. It's small and compact and packs a punch. I don't like what Asus did, triple fans, really? 🤣

Ah hell, I've been meaning to get a good value card to upgrade for a while now.

Might as well.