So apparently there's a bug with all the currently available drivers for the GTX 1060 that I just ran into. With several types of motherboards/BIOSes, the drivers won't resume properly from sleep mode. The only fix available at the moment seems to be to change the power settings in the BIOS to use S1 suspended mode rather than the standard S3 mode.

I currently have a GT 220 in my rig right now, with a crappy AMD Sempron LE-1300 CPU (yeah I need an upgrade) but anyways.... I was looking at the newer cards... and it seems either a 950 GTX or a 1060 GTX looks really good. The 1060 will be better prolly in the power usage, since its newer, and has better power management... but the new cards do look good.

A complete overhaul might be a better option ;)

Actually just from the naming I would not buy it:

EVGA = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Video_Graphics_Array

So why do you bother with such an old card? ;)

Oh I know, I am not upgrading this rig anymore LOL.... I just using it until it dies for now, (fund shortage), but yeah, those new cards look great.

Currently I am eyeing building a new rig with a i5 CPU and a Nvidia 950 GTX or 1060 GTX for the future, one day...

Nope, no cooling issues. Current Nvidia graphics cards are pretty efficient and need way less power than last gen cards (and thus need less cooling). As I said, I have the EVGA 1060 SC (6 GB). It comes with the same single fan and two additional copper heatpipes. The card's pretty silent while I'm playing games and when I'm not playing, the fan's even turned off most of the time!

The one you linked is the 3 GB model. Careful with that one, since it isn't a real GTX 1060!

You hopefully understand, that everything else in your computer will severely bottleneck a new graphics card, so you will not see any amazing improvement but a bit better it would be and it would support later versions of Direct X and OpenGL. You needing to upgrade was a bit of an understatement, says I on a computer from 2008.

Admittedly I got rid of my 6+ yr old components this year. It was amazing how long I got a good performance out of those buggers. I took all the working spares and used it to build a pc for my son. Waste not haha.

Buy it piece by piece, do it over several months. Makes it much easier to afford :D
That's some serious kit!

Ya know, I've been getting a similar problem on my old 555GT in the laptop. I'll take a look at your suggestion - maybe it'll do the trick for this GPU, too. Thanks!

I wasn't upgrading this computer I am on now, I was just stating those new Nvidia cards look really nice. This rig is just to be used until I get a new pc whenever that is lol

Oh, the new generation of GPUs sure look nice; I agree wholeheartedly :-)

In theory the GTX 1060 and many older Nvidia GPUs do support Vulkan & DX12, just not as efficiently as the RX 480, correct?

They do, my gtx 760 supports Vulkan and uses it quite well. I read that the RX 480 has an edge on that however.

Remember the old Nvidia cards from the 90s lol! My first card was the Geforce 4mx! Than I got the FX 5200, that Fairy demo was pretty back in the day! Than I got the 6200 with the mermaid demo, than a 7 series card... either 7400-7900 it had a small metal fan and it melted lol.

I got than the Geforce GT 220 which is what I have now still to this day from 2009! Love there cards. Except that one that melted, LOL

Of course they do support it. It'd be kinda weird not to support a standard. They just don't gain a lot from DX12. But that's not exactly a "weakness" of Nvidia. It's more the case that AMD got rid of some problems they had with DX11.

AMD had two major problems with DX11 compared to Nvidia (since AMD switched to their GCN architecture):

1. CPU overhead. DX12 and Vulkan reduce CPU overhead a lot! So AMD basically gets a "free boost" here.

2. They somehow never managed to make full use of all of their compute units on their GPUs. I have no idea why this is and why they never managed to solve this, but... yeah, this somehow is a problem for AMD. That's why the Fury X has some impressive numbers (the Fury X sounds absolutely sick on the data sheet) but doesn't perform anywhere near a less impressive sounding GTX 980 Ti or Titan X.

DX12 and Vulkan introduced a new way to handle different tasks concurrently (mainly "graphics" and "compute"). And this helps AMD to make better use of their compute units. In DX12 games, the Fury X beats the 980 Ti and Titan X (in most games DX12 is still slower than DX11, but that's another topic)! It finally makes use of the "impressive numbers".

That's the question... Nvidia never had the problem of massive CPU overhead and Nvidia never had a huge problem to make full use of their streaming multiprocessors (<- that's how Nvidia calls their compute units). They look bad in DX12 because they never had the problems that AMD just solved. They look bad because they always were good :/

Nvidia goes a different route for multi-engine stuff. AMD has its Asynchronous Compute Engine (a hardware based solution with a dedicated cache) and Nvidia has software controlled "dynamic load balancing". I can't say which of these two is more efficient. AMD's solution sounds better to me, but that's a way too technical topic.

What happens now, is that AMD's "old problem" meets the first DX12/Vulkan games. AMD has to throw out a powerful RX 480 at a low price to compete with a mid range card like the GTX 1060 (DX11). But when a game makes good use of DX12/Vulkan, the 480 suddenly competes with the GTX 1070.