Hardware & Technical Get a 1060 soonish or build a new rig in a few years with Skylake?

[Deleted member 110222]

So I was thinking about what the best way for me to go is, for when Elite has an inevitable hardware jump.

A 1060 would be massively cheaper... In the short-term anyway.

But, there's a lot I don't know about these new Skylake CPU's. Is there a real performance boost? Is it worth going up to them from Haswell?

And, given how Elite develops, as we saw in the release of Horizons, might it be better to go for a new build in a few years? I'm trying to work this out ASAP so I can start saving for the right thing.

Thoughts guys?

 

[Porina]

In architecture there are improvements in Skylake over Haswell, but if you already have a high end Haswell it likely isn't worth the cost of upgrading it. If you were to upgrade from the system in your sig, the 1060 would give a nice boost from the 960. CPU wise... that's no slouch and if you did want to upgrade you could get a k part and overclock it to 4 GHz and beyond without replacing the rest of the system.

Also note the successor to Skylake isn't far off, and AMD Zen is also around the corner and that may shake things up a bit.

 

[Deleted member 110222]

In architecture there are improvements in Skylake over Haswell, but if you already have a high end Haswell it likely isn't worth the cost of upgrading it. If you were to upgrade from the system in your sig, the 1060 would give a nice boost from the 960. CPU wise... that's no slouch and if you did want to upgrade you could get a k part and overclock it to 4 GHz and beyond without replacing the rest of the system.

Also note the successor to Skylake isn't far off, and AMD Zen is also around the corner and that may shake things up a bit.

Thanks. I had forgotten about the K model, so I'm thinking of getting that now. (it's been a while since I posted this thread, and being at my grandparent's place, looking at hardware is all I had to entertain myself. )

 

[Arnoldo]

On the subject of the 1060.....

Happy birthday to me today, looking at a 1060 for a present to replace aging 650 Ti Boost. Any differences between the different 'flavours' of 1060 that are worth noting?

Sorry to thread-jack

Cmdr A

 

[Deleted member 110222]

On the subject of the 1060.....

Happy birthday to me today, looking at a 1060 for a present to replace aging 650 Ti Boost. Any differences between the different 'flavours' of 1060 that are worth noting?

Sorry to thread-jack

Cmdr A

No problem. It's all a learning experience.

 

[Porina]

Any differences between the different 'flavours' of 1060 that are worth noting?

Big YES. There's basically two models, the 1060 3GB and 1060 6GB. Obviously one has double the video ram than the other, but they didn't stop there and the 3GB model also has about 10% fewer cores than the 6GB model. For future resistance, the 6GB is the logical choice to aim for, both for the slightly higher power, and the greater amount of ram.

Having said that, I was looking at the prices last night as I'm looking to expand my compute potential outside of gaming. The 3GB model was from £189, whereas the 6GB model started around £242. In my application the ram doesn't matter, so in my use case the 3GB gets me 90% of the power for 80% the price, which is nice. But if I was buying for gaming, I'd aim for 6GB without doubt as you don't want to end up choked on ram with newer big name games.

 

[Arnoldo]

Big YES. There's basically two models, the 1060 3GB and 1060 6GB. Obviously one has double the video ram than the other, but they didn't stop there and the 3GB model also has about 10% fewer cores than the 6GB model. For future resistance, the 6GB is the logical choice to aim for, both for the slightly higher power, and the greater amount of ram.

Having said that, I was looking at the prices last night as I'm looking to expand my compute potential outside of gaming. The 3GB model was from £189, whereas the 6GB model started around £242. In my application the ram doesn't matter, so in my use case the 3GB gets me 90% of the power for 80% the price, which is nice. But if I was buying for gaming, I'd aim for 6GB without doubt as you don't want to end up choked on ram with newer big name games.

sorry, my bad.. I'm aware of the 3Gb / 6Gb difference, what I should have asked was: Is there any difference between the variants of the 6GB GTX1060 produced by different manufacturers (e.g. Asus, MSI, EVGA, Gigabyte etc).

 

[Ashnak]

sorry, my bad.. I'm aware of the 3Gb / 6Gb difference, what I should have asked was: Is there any difference between the variants of the 6GB GTX1060 produced by different manufacturers (e.g. Asus, MSI, EVGA, Gigabyte etc).

From what I've read - similar to the price difference: minimal.

Reading the tests, you can find some minor differences. With my 960, I got the MSI Gaming because their cooling system looked slightly better to me than that of the competitors. With the 1060, the only test so far that I've read attested again the best cooling setup to the MSI, but also noticed squeaking coils in their sample.

If you have a visible gaming setup, the colour and control possibilities of the LEDs might be another difference - I couldn't care less about that.