Overclocking Showdown – the EVGA GTX 1060 3GB vs. the Red Devil RX 470

Intro

This overclocking showdown is a follow-up to the $199 EVGA GTX 1060 3GB and the $199 PowerColor Red Devil RX 470 4GB evaluations.  Today, we have updated each card to its latest drivers and have optimized our overclocks with all performance options set to their upper limits to get the highest performance.

At stock, the reference clocked EVGA GTX 1060 3GB won overall in DX11 performance over the Red Devil-clocked RX 470, and fell marginally short of the 6GB reference version GTX 1060 much as the RX 470 stands in relation to the RX 480.  This time, we will overclock the EVGA GTX 1060/3GB and the Red Devil RX 470 as far as they each will go with a maxed-out fan profile and with added voltage to see where they stand in relation to each other fully overclocked.

The Red Devil RX 470 OC vs. the EVGA GTX 1060 3GB

The $199 PowerColor Red Devil version of the RX 470 4GB is factory clocked up to it’s maximum boost speeds of 1270MHz from 1206MHz at stock.  The details of our manual overclocking to 5% may be found here.  We found that as long as the temperatures remain cool and the Power and Temperature limits are maximized, it will not throttle.  Even at 100% fan, the noise level is acceptable and the temperatures remain in the mid-70s C.  

We again tried a +6.5% overclock as the voltage was now maximized, but the overclock was right on the edge of stability and we experienced occasional crashes to desktop even though our games could still complete our benchmarks.  Although for a day-to-day overclock, we will use +6%, for this overclocking evaluation we settled on 6.5%, or on 1355MHz boost with stock memory clocks (1750MHz).  Higher memory clocks did not generally gain any performance and often negatively impacted it.

Overclocking the Gaming Edition of the EVGA  GTX 1060 3GB

We devoted a separate evaluation to the EVGA GTX 1060 3GB which you can read here.  We achieved a final stable overclock of +125 MHz to the core which settled in at or above 1974MHz with GPU Boost 3.0 for the majority of our benching as we kept our room cool for all of our game benchmarks. Watching the PrecisionX OC in-game overlay during our benchmark runs we also often observed 1987MHz.  Our memory overclock remained at +400MHz for its clock of 4404MHz which greatly contributed to the increased performance.  The fan got a mild whine which became intrusive when pushed from 90% to 100% but the GPU remained cool in the mid-70s C.

Testing Platform

Our testing platform is Windows 10 Home 64-bit, using an Intel Core i7-6700K at 4.00GHz which turbos to 4.4GHz for all cores as set in the ASRock Z7170 motherboard’s BIOS, and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR4 at 3000MHz. The settings and hardware are identical except for the two cards being tested.

We also feature our newest 2016 games, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst and Deux Ex Mankind Divided, and we also include Ashes of the Singularity, Hitman, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Total War Warhammer using DX12.  We have also added Futuremark’s DX12 benchmark, Time Spy.  We will compare the performance of 25 modern games at 1920×1080 and at 2560×1440 resolutions with maximum settings.

Before we run benchmarks, let’s check out the test configuration.