Nvidia is dropping the GTX 1060, but a modder just helped the GPU hit a new world record

There was a moment in time when Nvidia's trusty GTX 1060 was one of the most popular GPUs you could buy. It's coming up on a decade old now, and Nvidia is officially ending support for it — and all GTX 10-series GPUs — in the coming months. Despite that, TrashBench on YouTube spliced copper pipes onto the GTX 1060 6GB for an elaborate, if clearly DIY, liquid cooling setup to see how far they could push an overclock. And in the process, Trash Bench not only set a new world record, but also managed to take up the top six slots on the Fire Strike leaderboard for their hardware.

Nvidia's GTX 1060 6GB sets a new world record

In an admittedly narrow category

TrashBench shared the process of modding the GTX 1060 on YouTube (spotted by Tom's Hardware), which you can see below. Instead of a stack of LN2 and all the liquid-cooling gear money can buy, Trash Bench used a spare piece of copper, a bit of flexible tubing, a GPU core block, and a cooler to serve as a reservoir. The copper tubing was cut and flatted in a vice to sit on top of the VRAM and VRMs, and as you can see in the photos, secured with some plastic clamps. TrashBench connected the pipes with flexible tubing, and set up the cooling apparatus away from the main test bench with a PCIe riser cable.

Testing with 3DMark Fire Strike, Trash Bench eventually reached 2,202MHz on the core clock of the GTX 1060 6GB, and went from a base score of 12,675 to 14,302 with the overclock; a massive 12.8% improvement. In the process of overclocking the card, Trash Bench managed to gobble up the top six slots on the Fire Strike leaderboard for a PC running a GTX 1060 6GB and an Intel Core i5-12600KF.

Granted, that's a very specific world record, and a category where there isn't a lot of competition, but it shows some life left in a card like the GTX 1060. At the time of writing, the GTX 1060 is almost 9 years old to the day, and it's reached its end of life in the eyes of Nvidia. When Nvidia releases its next major driver update, it won't support GTX 10-series and older GPUs, including the GTX 1060 and the legendary GTX 1080 Ti. Thankfully, GTX 16-series GPUs aren't getting the boot, at least not yet.

Despite the card's age and impending end of life, TrashBench showed the GPU running Cyberpunk 2077 at a respectable 44 fps at 1080p, and that's without any upscaling assistance. You need some spare copper and a lot of patience to see similar performance, granted, but the GTX 1060 still has a bit of gas left in the tank if you're willing to get your hands dirty.