Palit GeForce GTX 1060 GamingPro OC Joins 6GB GDDR5X Bandwagon
NVIDIA's add-in board (AIB) partners are starting to update their product catalogs with updated GeForce GTX 1060 graphics cards sporting faster GDDR5X memory. Palit is the latest to jump on the bandwagon with its GeForce GTX 1060 GamingPro OC+ (NEB1060U15J9-1045D), and unlike the Gigabyte card we spotted yesterday, Palit lists the memory speed and bandwidth.
If this is the first you are hearing of GDDR5X memory on a GeForce GTX 1060, don't fret, you haven't been living under a rock. The faster memory was only recently added as an option on the mid-range card, and it arrived without any fanfare from NVIDIA—the GPU maker quietly updated its GeForce GTX 1060 product page to reflect "6GB GDDR5/X" in the frame buffer field.
What hasn't been known, however, is what speed chips NVIDIA's AIB partners would use. Micron's memory catalog shows three different options—10Gbps, 11Gbps, and 12Gbps. To calculate bandwidth, you divide the memory interface of the card (192-bit on the GeForce GTX 1060) by 8, then multiple the result with the memory clock frequency. So, 10Gbps chips result in 240GB/s, 11Gbps is 264GB/s, and 12Gbps works out to 288Gbps.
The specifications for Palit's overclocked card indicate a memory speed of 8.8Gbps and memory bandwidth of 211GB/s (rounded down from 211.2GB/s). It's an interesting figure, and could indicate that the new cards are using 8Gbps GDDR5X chips, only overclocked in this case. That would be consistent with NVIDIA's own specs, which still list the memory speed at 8Gbps.
If that's the case, hopefully NVIDIA's other hardware partners will overclock the memory as well, otherwise the swap to GDDR5X memory is meaningless in terms of performance. The assumed benefit is that these new variants would bump up the memory bandwidth, which can help with higher image quality settings and resolutions in games.
There is no word yet on when Palit's new card will be available to purchase or for how much.
