Gigabyte and Palit unveil GTX 1060 graphics cards with gddr5x

Gigabyte and Palit have put variants of the GeForce GTX 1060 with 6GB gddr5x on their site. The Palit card has a memory clock speed of 8.8Gbit/s, which is less than the so-called 9Gbit/s versions of the GTX 1060.

Palit’s card is the GeForce GTX 1060 GamingPro OC+ and the only change from the 1060 GamingPro OC seems to be the use of gddr5x instead of gddr5. That gddr5x memory is clocked at 8.8Gbit/s, according to the specifications, which leads to a total memory bandwidth of 211GB/s. With the regular GamingPro OC, the gddr5 memory runs at 8Gbit/s, for a bandwidth of 192GB/s. Since last year, however, there are also the so-called 9Gbit/s versions of the GTX 1060. With these cards, the gddr5 memory is at 9Gbit/s.

It is still unclear on which GPU the GeForce GTX 1060 with gddr5x is based. It has been rumored for some time that it is the GP104 of the GTX 1080, with parts of the chip disabled. Gigabyte has now also put its GeForce GTX 1060 G1 Gaming D5X online. A week and a half ago, the message appeared that Gigabyte would come with this card, after which Nvidia confirmed that by putting the specification on its site.

Gddr5x is the successor of gddr5 with the necessary stretch to increase the bandwidth, while retaining the form factor so that manufacturers can relatively easily release variants of existing video cards with the memory. The type of memory would increasingly be used for the mainstream and eventually also the low-end, for example Micron expects. For high-end cards there is gddr6 and high bandwidth memory.