Colorful Igame GTX 1060 3GB Review

I will be looking at Colorful Igame GTX 1060 3GB Review. Colorful has recently launched in this market hence they have requested for a local content. This is one beautifully designed card, we have a custom PCB, a 6 pin power connector, iGame Full-armor backplate, Silver Plating technology, one-key overclocking to name a few of the functional aspects. We have also reviewed colorful geforce gtx 1050 as well.How has this card performed on our test bench? Let’s find out.

Colorful Igame GTX 1060 3GB Review

• Manufacturer:                Colorful iGame GTX 1060 3G Review
• Series:                            iGame Vulkan
• Price:                              Check Price on Amazon
• Availability:                    TexonWare

Colorful Specifications

Graphics Card Packaging and Unboxing

The graphics card comes in a cardboard box retail pack. On the front cover, we have iGame brand name and the logo printed on the top left corner in the red color. Nvidia GeForce GTX logo is printed on the top right side. colorful igame gtx 1060 3gb review is printed under the anime character picture. Salient features of the Pascal are printed on the bottom right side. The backside of the box has the Nvidia logo printed on the top left side. The graphics card model is printed on its right side. Colorful is printed in the white color on the top right side.

IGAME brand name and logo are printed under it. Vulkan is the premium, main streamline of the graphics cards from the Colorful focusing on the sheer performance, design, customization and powerful cooling. The company’s the contact address is mentioned at the bottom left side. Part No sticker is pasted at the bottom.

The left side of the box has iGame brand name and logo printed in the white/silver colors on the top side. The graphics card model is printed on the bottom side. The right side of the box has iGame brand name and logo printed in the white color on the top side. The graphics card model is printed on the bottom side.

There is a serial no sticker pasted under the iGame brand name. The top side of the box has the graphics card model printed on the left side. Gamer Customization tag is printed on the right side. The bottom side of the box has the key features of the Pascal printed in the list format on the left side. Minimum system requirements are: –

• PCIe Compliant motherboard with x16 PCIe slot
• Minimum 400W PSU
• 350MB of free disk space
• 4GB System Memory [6GB or higher is recommended]
• Microsoft Windows 10/8/7 [32 / 64 bit]

Contents of the box are printed next. Barcode sticker is pasted on the rightmost side. Opening the box would show the black color Styrofoam padding covering the contents. Removing it would show the graphics card nicely tucked inside the anti-static plastic sheet. The operation guide and the installation disk are placed on the top of the graphics card. There is Styrofoam padding on the bottom of the box for further protection.

Graphic Card Accessories

Following are provided with the box:

• Installation Disk
• Operation Guide
• A 6-pin PEG cable with two Molex connectors in case PSU does not have a PEG cable. Personally, I don’t prefer this implementation. Cables are individually braided, which is a thumb up.

Closer Look

Before digging into the design elements of this colorful igame gtx 1060 3gb review, let’s first talk about the Gamer Customization as this tagline catches my attention. iGame provides personalized customized services for gamers. Since their launching, the iGame has been collecting thousands’ of gamers’ ideas and engineers’ wisdom.

Going that route the iGame has ensured that each of their product is unique and meets the gamers’ needs particularly focusing on the design elements of the cards, the power delivery components and their design, the cooling performance and other unique technologies.

iGame VULCAN series is their largest one of the product lines. It features the ultimate performance level that gamers’ would eye for coupled with the cooling and customization with the variety of the iGame accessories.

Without further ado let’s take a look at the design of the card. Due to the restriction from source, I did not open the card to take a look at the circuitry. The graphics card out of the box speaks for its simple yet beautifully designed shroud. There are two 80mm fans on it which the iGame has referred to as Blaze DUO cooler. There are 9 impellers on each fan. These are not LED fans. Each fan has a sticker pasted on the rotor hub.

Each sticker has iGame brand name and logo printed on it. The shroud is made of the plastic but mind you, it is nowhere cheap from anywhere. Build quality is good. A quick glimpse of the shroud will give you a feel of the Asus and Gigabyte design! Just saying! The shroud does not have a rectangular design but it follows the symmetry of the fans. The overall design of the shroud is geometrical.

There are two Orange accent lines on the left side of the shroud and same design is followed on the right side to ensure the symmetry in the overall design. The middle section between the fans has a beautiful geometrical design with curves and edges. The top and bottom sides of the middle section have triangular design pointing towards each other.

The right side of the shroud has a bold finish with both edges taking a sharp lead and triangular design on the middle. The impellers of the fans seem to be tinted brown shade and they are bit transparent.

Focusing on the cooling solution, this card has a single aluminum heat sink. There are two nickel-plated copper heat pipes one of 8mm thickness and the other of 6mm thickness. There is a nickel plated copper base plate making contact with GPU die. Heat sinks are making contact with that base plate for heat dissipation.

The good thing is that the base plate is also making contact with VRAM chips so the cooling solution does take into account the VRAM cooling. The portion (a bulk of it) of the heatsink making contact with the GPU die and VRAM chips has more thickness than the area covering the power delivery circuitry. Again we could see heatsink making contact with the VRM/MOSFETs directly to keep them cool under load.

The heatsink has crossed over the PCB from the front side. Similarly, the shroud has crossed over the PCB. Since we did not open the card, hence we are not sure how many fins are in the stack. One observation that we made on the rightmost side of the heatsink is that there is a silver plate under the heatsink that has holes on both sides to catch the shroud to the sink.

This silver plate has a bend on the upper side. Not sure if this was poorly installed or the pressure was too much to give as the bend.

Let’s take a look at the bottom side of the graphics card. We can see that the color of the PCB is black. The backplate is secured with the 7 screws. Unfortunately, the screws head side is not on the backplate but on the PCB so if you have to take off the backplate, you would need to take off the heat sink and fan shroud first.

On the far right side, there is a 6-pin power connector to the fans. The left side of the fan shroud is not fully covering the PCB from the I/O side. There are vents on the side of the shroud for better air flow. There is a 4-pin white color connector on the right side to power the fans.

Let’s take a look at the top side. There are two screws securing the shroud with the heat sink. The heat pipes are coming out of the heat sink and have more height to them making them visible on the top of the shroud. They are still under the shroud. There are a IGAME brand logo and text pasted in the middle of the shroud for aesthetics.

This part does not have any LED. There are vents in the shroud’s body on the left and the right side of the text area. The 6-pin power header is on the right side of the PCB. The PCB has no SLI finger as Pascal based GTX 1060 does not have SLI support.

There is an iGame Full Armor backplate on the backside of the card. The backplate is covering the entire PCB. There are an iGame brand name and logo printed in the white color. There are two stickers pasted on the top. The right sticker has a complete model and the serial no of the graphics card printed on it. The second sticker has a country of manufacturing info along with other certification compliance info.

Graphics card is made in China. There are 4 spring loaded screws securing the PCB with the heatsink. There are 7 other screws as well which are hooking the PCB with the heatsink. We can see the terminating end of 7 screws securing the backplate with the PCB. There is a sticker pasted on the opening side of one the spring-loaded screws.

Tearing or removing it would void the warranty. In my opinion, companies should adhere to open policy with regard to the putting a sticker on any of these screws. The front side of the card shows that the fan shroud extends the length of the PCB. The far end of the black color heatsink is visible. The power cable for the fan is being routed on the right side. Please note that the heat sink is also extending over where the PCB is terminating.

This is a well thought out design.

 

The I/O shield has a typical vented design. Following connectivity options are available on this card:

• 3x DisplayPort 1.4
• 1x HDMI 2.0
• 1x DVI-D

There is a pressed down button on the top left side of the I/O shield. It has Turbo written on top of it and Normal under it. If it is pressed in the card will be in the normal mode but if it is pressed up indicated by the blue color portion of the slider, the card will be in the OC mode. This is what the iGame refers to as One-Key overclocking to 1771MHz.

The card is using advanced silver plating technology PCB as compared to the traditional copper-based PCBs. This technology helps in reducing oxidization and improving the PCB integrity for superior stability up to twice as compared to the traditional PCBs.

The PCB is using the I.P.P Digital Power Supply with 4+1 power phases which enables the power delivery components to achieved lower DC impedance than same size inductance with lower working temperatures and lowers EMI.

Testing

Following test bench setup was used to test the performance of the graphics card:

• Intel i7 6850k
• Asus Rampage V Edition 10
• Ballistix Elite 4x4GB @ 3000MHz DDR4
• Open Loop Setup using Swiftech and Alphacool goodies
• Corsair AX1200i
• Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD for OS
• Seagate Barracuda 2TB
• Asus VX24AH

Previously, Battlefield 4, Call of Duty Black Ops 3 and Gear of Wars 4 were the part of the test games. They have been dropped. Metro Last Light Redux will continue to be featured as this game based on its rich environment and taxing effects on the graphics card are handy to measure the performance of any given graphics card. Following games have been tested: –

• Battlefield 1
• DOOM
• Grand Theft Auto V
• Metro Last Light Redux
• Witcher 3
• Mass Effect Andromeda
• The Rise of the Tomb Raider
• Call of Duty: WorldWar II

The games were tested at maxed out settings mentioned in the graphs as well. Microsoft Windows 10 x64 version 1709 was used. Nvidia graphics driver version 388.71 was used. FPS were monitored using MSAfterBurnerer 4.4.2 Game settings were set from within the games, not from the GeForce Experience.

All the reported framerates are average FPS. In case you are wondering why this old driver then it is for a reason that the other cards in the graphs were tested using these drivers and these cards are not available with us for testing with new drivers.

Following synthetic benchmarks were used:

• 3D Mark
• Unigine Superposition

Previously Unigine Heaven and Valley were a part of our testing but they have been dropped and only superposition will be featured. As this is a 3GB version card, we have tested it for 1920×1080 resolution only. 2k and 4k scores have been mentioned as 0 in the graphs since we did not test the card at those resolutions.

Let’s take a look at the performance graphs.

3D Mark

These are the graphics score only.

Unigine Superposition

Grand Theft Auto – V

Battlefield 1

DOOM

Metro Last Light Redux

Mass Effect Andromeda

Call of Duty: World War II

Witcher 3

Rise of the Tomb Raider

 

Overclocking

The card boosted to 1836MHz out of the box. During my overclocking session with this colorful igame gtx 1060 3gb card review , it reached 2101MHz boost clock with +225MHz on the core clock and the +650MHz on the memory clock. With 100% voltage boost, the core clock was reaching 2101MHz easily but as the temperature starts kicking the boost clock reduces to 2088MHz. Here is the result of various testing frequencies and their results:

Core Clock (MHz)	Memory Clock (MHz)	Voltage (%age)	Boost Clock (MHz)	Memory Boost Clock (MHz)	Test Result
+100	+250	50	1965	4253	Passed
+150	+250	50	2025	4253	Passed
+175	+250	50	2038	4253	Passed
+200	+250	50	2063	4253	Passed
+225	+250	50	2088	4253	Passed
+250	+250	50	2114	4253	Failed
+250	+250	100	2126	4253	Failed
+225	+450	100	2088	4455	Passed
+225	+550	100	2088	4552	Passed
+225	+650	100	2088	4658	Passed
+225	+750	100	2088	4752	Failed
+225	+700	100	2088	4705	Failed

 

Here are the results of the synthetic benchmarks with overclocked graphics card:

Superposition

 Thermals

Room temp was 37°C at the time of the testing. In an open bench table, the maximum temperature hit by the graphics card was 70°C. With overclocking max temperature was 74°C. Mind you this temperature reading is taken after 15 minutes run of the Furmark and the CPU was also stressed test at a same time using AIDA64.

Acoustics

Fans were left on default fan curve. We did not measure the acoustic performance as the summer season is at its peak here and there are certain environmental noises that are beyond our control. Based on our experience with testing fans and graphics cards, the acoustics were at near silent levels.

Power Consumption

The Corsair AX1200i is a digital PSU with monitoring enabled on the power consumption. Corsair Link was used to check the power consumption under stock clocks and overclocked clocks. The Furmark and AIDA64 were run at the same time to check the power consumption of the system.

Conclusion

The colorful igame gtx 1060 3gb review Vulkan 3G features Nvidia’s 16nm GP106 chip with Die size of 200mm² and 4400M transistors. It packs 48 ROPs and 72 TMUs with 1152 CUDA Cores. It has a pixel fill rate of 74.7 GP/s and texture fill rate of 112.1 GT/s.

The card has 3GB of Samsung GDDR5 VRAM clocked at 2002MHz with 128-bit interface and bandwidth of 192.2 GB/s. Default Clock is 1557MHz with the boost clock of 1772MHz.

The card has a beautiful and symmetrical design overall. The cooling department is strong featuring two 80mm fans termed as Blaze DUO and aluminum heat sink having two nickel coated copper heat pipes. One pipe has a 6mm thickness and the other has 8mm thickness. There is no LED gimmick on this colorful igame gtx 1060 3gb review card though the black mount on the top side of the shroud would have looked badass with the RGB lighting solution.

The shroud has a geometrical design with edges, insets and grooves which looks pleasant in person. Each fan has 9 impellers. There is a sticker on the hub of both fans. There are two orange accent lines on the left and right sides of the shroud. Our sample did not come with the protective cover on the PCIe connector, 1 DP port, and DIV-D connector.

Only 2x DP and HDMI ports have protective covers with iGame printed on the covers. The dimensions of the card are 269mm x 123mm x 38mm (L x H x D). The build quality is good though we spot a bend on the silver plate located under the finstack on the front side.

The card has a Full-Armor backplate which is secured with the PCB using 7 screws all of which are mounted from the PCB side. The heatsink is secured with the PCB using 4 screws. The shroud is secured with the heatsink using 4 screws as well.

There is a pressed down button on the top left side of the I/O shield. It has Turbo written on top of it and Normal under it. If it is pressed in the card will be in the normal mode but if it is pressed up indicated by the blue color portion of the slider, the card will be in the OC mode. This is what the iGame refers to as One-Key overclocking.

In terms of connectivity, we have a DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0 port and DVI-D port. The card is using advanced silver plating technology PCB as compared to the traditional copper based PCBs. This technology helps in reducing oxidization and improving the PCB integrity for superior stability up to twice as compared to the traditional PCBs.

The PCB is using the I.P.P Digital Power Supply with 4+1 power phases which enables the power delivery components to achieved lower DC impedance than same size inductance with lower working temperatures and lower EMI.

Value and Performance

I have put the card to test out on the Full HD resolution using the graphics Ultra settings. The graphs are speaking for a good performance of this colorful igame gtx 1060 3gb review graphics card. Can’t really say that performance is right on the money but still performance is decent and it comes with a 1 year warranty from Texonware.

We are thankful to Colorful Pakistan for providing the Colorful iGame GEForce GTX 1060 Vulkan 3G for the review.

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