Upgrading to the NVIDIA 1060 from the 960m: Is it Worth It?

The NVIDIA 960m is an older graphics card that was commonly found in laptops several years ago. However, with the release of newer models such as the 1060, there's been a significant increase in performance and power efficiency. In this article, we'll explore whether upgrading to the 1060 from the 960m is worth it, especially considering the cost difference.

For those who may be wondering, the NVIDIA 960m is about 2.1 times faster than the original 960m. This means that if you have a gaming laptop with a 960m in it and are thinking of upgrading to the 1060, you're looking at about a 70% performance improvement compared to the desktop chip. However, this is still about 200-50% faster than a 960m desktop chip. While you can still find deals on laptops with 960m, there's some excellent $800 machines with i7 processors and 1060 that offer more than double the graphics performance for about $500 more.

Memory and VRAM

The main difference between the 960m and the 1060 is the amount of memory and VRAM. The desktop chip has 3 GB of VRAM, while the 1060 has 6 GB. This significant increase in memory allows for smoother gameplay and reduces the need to drop detail settings from Ultra to High.

If you were to play games on a 3 GB 1060, you would be slightly out of VRAM. However, this isn't an issue when playing games like Battlefield 1 at Ultra detail and 1080p resolution. The game will have to do some swapping, but it's still manageable. If you prefer to play with lower detail settings, the 3 GB 1060 will still be more than enough.

On the other hand, having 6 GB of VRAM is no issue at all. This means that you can enjoy games like Battlefield 1 at Ultra detail and 1080p resolution without any lag or performance issues.

Clock Speed and RAM Amount

The clock speed of the 1060 is the same as the desktop cards, with a boost clock of 4 GHz. However, since it's in a laptop, we need to double that to 8 GHz due to the DDR technology used. This ensures that the graphics card has the same performance as the desktop model.

The CPU of this system is an i7-7600H processor, which is essentially the same as the i7-7700K processor found in desktop systems. However, the clock speed has been reduced slightly to fit within a laptop's power profile and heat dissipation capabilities. The temperature on the CPU is running just over 70°C, even with moderate system usage.

Real-Time Frame Rate

One of the most important aspects of any gaming laptop is its real-time frame rate. In this case, we're playing Battlefield 1 at Ultra detail and 1080p resolution, which results in an average frame rate of over 80 FPS, a minimum of 55 FPS, and a maximum of 143 FPS.

In conclusion, upgrading to the NVIDIA 1060 from the 960m is a significant improvement in performance and power efficiency. While it may not be worth the cost for those on a tight budget, there are some excellent $800 machines with i7 processors and 1060 that offer more than double the graphics performance. The increase in memory and VRAM also ensures smoother gameplay and reduces the need to drop detail settings.

Specifications

* Clock Speed: 8 GHz (DDR)

* Memory: 6 GB

* VRAM: 3.5 GB

* CPU: i7-7600H processor

* System RAM: Almost 8 GB (base system comes with 12 GB)

Real-World Performance and Results

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello and welcome to Tech deals game performance review Battlefield 1 we're playing today on the MSI Apache Pro gaming laptop computer I have previously reviewed this computer Link in the video description below but in short for this price point this is the best deal on the market at the moment what do you get for your $1,200 you get an Intel Core i7 6700hq processor this is a true quad core processor with eight threads up to 3.5 GHz excellent performance you get 12 GB of RAM although the machine I'm actually testing this on has been upgraded to 16 and you get nvidia's GeForce GTX 10606 GB graphics card notice I did not say mobile I said graphics card this laptop has the same chip in it that desktop GTX 1060s half providing you with amazing gaming performance check out my reviews in the video description below on this laptop to learn more about it but in short this is incredible gaming on a reasonably priced gaming laptop we are playing today at 1080p full HD resolution Ultra detail preset antialising is on and vsync is turned off fraps was used for the minimum maximum and average game performance numbers you'll see at the end of this video it was not used however to capture the video that you're going to watch instead an external hd6 60 Pro Hardware capture card was used there is zero effect on the frame rate because the video was captured on another computer the numbers in green at the top left corner of the screen are from MSI After Burner a free program you can download from MSI to get more information about what your computer is doing in real time the very first line GPU one well that is our star attraction the GTX 10606 6 GB card why is it labeled gpu1 that's because GPU 2 is actually Intel's HD 530 integrated Graphics this laptop comes with nvidia's technology that will turn on and off the graphics chip for power saving purposes when you're playing a game such as Battlefield 1 it turns the GTX 1060 on automatically to give you great performance when you're in Windows watching YouTube videos browsing the web it turns the graphics chip off and switches to Intel's internal Graphics chip which uses less electricity and makes your battery last longer very cool technology so the first number the percentage 99% indicates that we're using all of our graphics performance that's what's giving us this incredible frame rate we're currently getting is that incredible GTX 1060 the 77° is the temperature the graphics chip is running at it's warm but that's normal for a laptop and it's well within normal parameters and then we're running at about 1,700 MHz now for those of you who have watched various game performance videos I've done on desktop GTX 1060s you'll notice that the clock speed here varies and is lower than it is on the desktop cards that's the compromise the clock speed has to be reduced in order to get the thermal profile and the power profile within a limit that a laptop can use and occasionally you will notice that the clock speed drops down a bit down into the 12 to 1300 MHz range that basically means that it's reaching its limits in terms of temperature and performance and it's dropping its performance back it will then accelerate when it's able to it's essentially operating at the limits of what the chip and what a laptop can do now on the desktop side many desktop 1060s will run closer to 2 GHz so you are taking a 10 to 20% performance penalty for having the chip in a laptop because of the lower clock speed the actual core count the amount of uh Kuda cores the amount of processing power is the same between the desktop and the laptop chip only the frequency has been changed now this was not true in the 9900 Series in fact I don't believe this has ever been true in laptops in the past if it has it's been a while and I certainly don't remember it the GTX 960m was not the same chip as the GTX hang on that's funny there I was killed some some shell or something hit the building and I was killed by Falling debris that was funny the 960m and the desktop 960 were completely different chips different core counts different Cuda cor everything in fact a 960m mobile chip has about the same performance as a desktop 750 Ti it's about half the performance of a desktop 960 whereas here we have about 90% of the performance of a desktop 1060 that's incredible and that's thanks to the new production process and improvements in technology that have come out in the past couple of years this is incredible this this GTX 1060 from a laptop point of view is about 2 and 1 12 times faster than the 960m was so if you have a gaming laptop that had a 960m in it and you're thinking well is it worth upgrading to the 1060 absolutely a 960 desktop chip compared to a 1060 desktop chip you're looking at about a 70% performance Improvement it's a great performance and even that's worth doing but this is 200 50% faster than a 960m so the so while you can still find deals on laptops with 960m there's some excellent $800 machines with i7 processors and 960m keep in mind that for about 400ish $500 more you get more than double the graphics performance that's pretty cool moving down to line two you have memory one this is the vram on the graphics card this is not your main system Ram it's the video RAM we are using 3 and 1/2 GB of it now it is true that if you were trying to play this on a 3 gab 1060 you would be slightly out of vram having actually played Battlefield 1 on a on a 3 GB 1060 it's actually okay it has to do a little bit of swapping but it's fine now the other option you have of course if you have a 3 GB 1060 is you can always drop the detail from Ultra down to high and then you'll be well within the 3 GB limit and going forward on 3 GB cards that's going to be the solution 2 or 3 years from now I still believe three and 4 GB cards will still play all the current games at 1080p just fine they just won't do it at Ultra detail you'll have to turn the detail down but you'll have to turn the detail down anyway because the compute power won't be there but moving on from that issue this this computer has 6 GB of vram so that's definitely not an issue the clock speed of this is the same as the desktop cards 4 GHz and keep in mind it's DDR so you have to double that to 8 GHz so this is 8 GHz gddr5 it is the same performance same RAM amount same speed as the desktop 1060 the third line is our CPU this is our wonderful i76700hq processor this is essentially the same i7 chip that's in the desktop an i76700k processor well that's what this is except it's not overclockable and the clock speed has been reduced a bit to fit within a laptop the power profiles and heat temperature Etc now you can see that the temperature on the CPU is running just over 70° C we are using a lot of system resources which is why both chips are running relatively warm now you can hear the fan in this laptop when you're playing games now the laptop is completely silent within windows but there is a a a slight fan noise when you're playing games to keep the temperatures within check is a very high Performance Machine the fourth line main system Ram we're using almost 8 GB of RAM the base system comes with 12 this is the 16 GB model could you play this on 12 absolutely now I personally prefer the 16 gig model but that's just me but the 12 GB would be fine for current generation games finally you have our real time frame rate which you can see is currently over 60 frames a second considering that we are playing Battlefield 1 and Ultra detail and we're doing so on laptop computer and we are getting more than 60 frames a second that is pretty cool honestly I have yet to find a game that this laptop does not play perfectly at 1080p at higher Ultra detail at over 60 frames per second that was not true of the 960m based GTX 960m laptops that I've been testing but this 1060 is a beast let's take a look at the results Ultra detail 1080p 80 frames per second average minimum of 55 Max of 143 that was perfect performance while it says minimum 55 I couldn't find a space in there where it was actually under 60 it probably dipped down for one or two frames but otherwise that was absolutely perfect very smooth very playable in all respects like this video if you like it don't if you don't remember to subscribe to my Channel with a big huge red button directly below questions and comments in the comment section and as always check out my video description deson the link to Amazon and Newegg where I bought I actually bought this laptop on Amazon but you can buy it either at Amazon or New Egg uh as well as my full playlist of videos on this laptop are linked below go check those out I will see you in the next video thank you very much for watchinghello and welcome to Tech deals game performance review Battlefield 1 we're playing today on the MSI Apache Pro gaming laptop computer I have previously reviewed this computer Link in the video description below but in short for this price point this is the best deal on the market at the moment what do you get for your $1,200 you get an Intel Core i7 6700hq processor this is a true quad core processor with eight threads up to 3.5 GHz excellent performance you get 12 GB of RAM although the machine I'm actually testing this on has been upgraded to 16 and you get nvidia's GeForce GTX 10606 GB graphics card notice I did not say mobile I said graphics card this laptop has the same chip in it that desktop GTX 1060s half providing you with amazing gaming performance check out my reviews in the video description below on this laptop to learn more about it but in short this is incredible gaming on a reasonably priced gaming laptop we are playing today at 1080p full HD resolution Ultra detail preset antialising is on and vsync is turned off fraps was used for the minimum maximum and average game performance numbers you'll see at the end of this video it was not used however to capture the video that you're going to watch instead an external hd6 60 Pro Hardware capture card was used there is zero effect on the frame rate because the video was captured on another computer the numbers in green at the top left corner of the screen are from MSI After Burner a free program you can download from MSI to get more information about what your computer is doing in real time the very first line GPU one well that is our star attraction the GTX 10606 6 GB card why is it labeled gpu1 that's because GPU 2 is actually Intel's HD 530 integrated Graphics this laptop comes with nvidia's technology that will turn on and off the graphics chip for power saving purposes when you're playing a game such as Battlefield 1 it turns the GTX 1060 on automatically to give you great performance when you're in Windows watching YouTube videos browsing the web it turns the graphics chip off and switches to Intel's internal Graphics chip which uses less electricity and makes your battery last longer very cool technology so the first number the percentage 99% indicates that we're using all of our graphics performance that's what's giving us this incredible frame rate we're currently getting is that incredible GTX 1060 the 77° is the temperature the graphics chip is running at it's warm but that's normal for a laptop and it's well within normal parameters and then we're running at about 1,700 MHz now for those of you who have watched various game performance videos I've done on desktop GTX 1060s you'll notice that the clock speed here varies and is lower than it is on the desktop cards that's the compromise the clock speed has to be reduced in order to get the thermal profile and the power profile within a limit that a laptop can use and occasionally you will notice that the clock speed drops down a bit down into the 12 to 1300 MHz range that basically means that it's reaching its limits in terms of temperature and performance and it's dropping its performance back it will then accelerate when it's able to it's essentially operating at the limits of what the chip and what a laptop can do now on the desktop side many desktop 1060s will run closer to 2 GHz so you are taking a 10 to 20% performance penalty for having the chip in a laptop because of the lower clock speed the actual core count the amount of uh Kuda cores the amount of processing power is the same between the desktop and the laptop chip only the frequency has been changed now this was not true in the 9900 Series in fact I don't believe this has ever been true in laptops in the past if it has it's been a while and I certainly don't remember it the GTX 960m was not the same chip as the GTX hang on that's funny there I was killed some some shell or something hit the building and I was killed by Falling debris that was funny the 960m and the desktop 960 were completely different chips different core counts different Cuda cor everything in fact a 960m mobile chip has about the same performance as a desktop 750 Ti it's about half the performance of a desktop 960 whereas here we have about 90% of the performance of a desktop 1060 that's incredible and that's thanks to the new production process and improvements in technology that have come out in the past couple of years this is incredible this this GTX 1060 from a laptop point of view is about 2 and 1 12 times faster than the 960m was so if you have a gaming laptop that had a 960m in it and you're thinking well is it worth upgrading to the 1060 absolutely a 960 desktop chip compared to a 1060 desktop chip you're looking at about a 70% performance Improvement it's a great performance and even that's worth doing but this is 200 50% faster than a 960m so the so while you can still find deals on laptops with 960m there's some excellent $800 machines with i7 processors and 960m keep in mind that for about 400ish $500 more you get more than double the graphics performance that's pretty cool moving down to line two you have memory one this is the vram on the graphics card this is not your main system Ram it's the video RAM we are using 3 and 1/2 GB of it now it is true that if you were trying to play this on a 3 gab 1060 you would be slightly out of vram having actually played Battlefield 1 on a on a 3 GB 1060 it's actually okay it has to do a little bit of swapping but it's fine now the other option you have of course if you have a 3 GB 1060 is you can always drop the detail from Ultra down to high and then you'll be well within the 3 GB limit and going forward on 3 GB cards that's going to be the solution 2 or 3 years from now I still believe three and 4 GB cards will still play all the current games at 1080p just fine they just won't do it at Ultra detail you'll have to turn the detail down but you'll have to turn the detail down anyway because the compute power won't be there but moving on from that issue this this computer has 6 GB of vram so that's definitely not an issue the clock speed of this is the same as the desktop cards 4 GHz and keep in mind it's DDR so you have to double that to 8 GHz so this is 8 GHz gddr5 it is the same performance same RAM amount same speed as the desktop 1060 the third line is our CPU this is our wonderful i76700hq processor this is essentially the same i7 chip that's in the desktop an i76700k processor well that's what this is except it's not overclockable and the clock speed has been reduced a bit to fit within a laptop the power profiles and heat temperature Etc now you can see that the temperature on the CPU is running just over 70° C we are using a lot of system resources which is why both chips are running relatively warm now you can hear the fan in this laptop when you're playing games now the laptop is completely silent within windows but there is a a a slight fan noise when you're playing games to keep the temperatures within check is a very high Performance Machine the fourth line main system Ram we're using almost 8 GB of RAM the base system comes with 12 this is the 16 GB model could you play this on 12 absolutely now I personally prefer the 16 gig model but that's just me but the 12 GB would be fine for current generation games finally you have our real time frame rate which you can see is currently over 60 frames a second considering that we are playing Battlefield 1 and Ultra detail and we're doing so on laptop computer and we are getting more than 60 frames a second that is pretty cool honestly I have yet to find a game that this laptop does not play perfectly at 1080p at higher Ultra detail at over 60 frames per second that was not true of the 960m based GTX 960m laptops that I've been testing but this 1060 is a beast let's take a look at the results Ultra detail 1080p 80 frames per second average minimum of 55 Max of 143 that was perfect performance while it says minimum 55 I couldn't find a space in there where it was actually under 60 it probably dipped down for one or two frames but otherwise that was absolutely perfect very smooth very playable in all respects like this video if you like it don't if you don't remember to subscribe to my Channel with a big huge red button directly below questions and comments in the comment section and as always check out my video description deson the link to Amazon and Newegg where I bought I actually bought this laptop on Amazon but you can buy it either at Amazon or New Egg uh as well as my full playlist of videos on this laptop are linked below go check those out I will see you in the next video thank you very much for watching\n"