At an event in Asia, NVIDIA officially confirmed the existence and specifications of the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB variant. The folks over at Videocardz reported on a picture of a presentation slide which showcases both the 6GB and 3GB variants of the Pascal GP106 based GPU, which will differ much greater than initially thought, with the 3GB variant having one SM module disabled, giving it a 128 fewer CUDA cores than the currently released 6GB model.
NVIDIA Confirms GTX 1060 3GB Specifications
As we can see in the image above, the GTX 1060 will indeed be available in a 3GB variant, just as everyone initially thought when the GTX 1060 was merely a rumor. However, what is very peculiar is the fact that the two models will apparently differ in more than just memory capacity as the 3GB variant is shown here to have just 1152 CUDA cores, or 128 fewer than the 6GB model.
By now, you’re probably thinking “Okay, why not just call this the GTX 1050?” That is a very good question, but one for which we currently do not have an answer. My initial thought was that this 3GB variant will be delivered to OEMs only, and not a commercially available product for consumers. That idea, however, seems to be dispelled by WCCFTech, who spotted a number of leaked listings for Gainward cards which match these specifications.
Aside from memory and CUDA cores, the other specifications seem to be the same. The 3GB variant will still feature a 120W TDP, require a 6-PIN PCIe power connector, and feature a 1.7GHz GPU core clock.
There is no information on specific pricing as of yet, but I would expect somewhere in the $199 area. While I will not speculate as to NVIDIA’s intentions with the naming scheme, calling this a GTX 1060 while reducing the CUDA core count significantly may be a bit disingenuous as it could lead consumers to believe that the 3GB variants will offer similar performance to the 6GB ones, when they clearly will not.
Source: Videocardz, WCCFTech
