My AMD Radeon R7 265 is a good card. I play a lot of older games and probably the most demanding games I play are Fallout 3 and Skyrim. The 265 held up just fine but I was looking to update the card. I chose to update to the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060. The 1060 is more powerful in processing video than the 265 and I can tell that mostly when I play Skyrim. The video I see while playing games seems smoother and the fans in my PC don't run as loud. The 1060 is not the most powerful card Nvidia offers and probably won't run the latest games on full settings or very smoothly. That is okay since I won't be playing those games for a couple of years from now. I don't buy games right away. Prices for games are too high when they are released. I also wait to buy until I have a computer that I can afford that can actually play them!
What appealed to me about the 1060 was that I could get a video card that was a little more powerful in processing video than my 265 and yet it uses less electrical power. Less electrical power draw means a video card that won't be heating up my small computer case and won't need a huge power supply. I want to get away from having to upgrade my power supply every time I upgrade my video card for performance reasons. Right now my 1060 uses a single 6 pin plug from my power supply. In the future I would like to find a video card that gives me at least the same or better video processing power and just uses the PCIe video card slot without any plugs from the power supply. When I go into Fry's and see a 1200 watt power supply on the shelf I just shake my head in disbelief. I currently have a 650 watt power supply and I think that is as far as I will ever go. I will probably never have more than one video card in my system unless there is a power savings advantage to that in the future. Monster power supplies, multiple video cards and a computer case the size of a refrigerator is not the direction I want to go in so the 1060 is helping me stay on a "manageable" path.
For a lot of home users that don't play games the 1060 is incredibly fast and way more than what they need. For me this "mid-range" video card is helping me stay entertained by video games without becoming a hardware slave that you can easily become with a gaming computer set-up. Most of what I do on my computers is what everyone else does. I check emails, surf the web, watch a video and use some productivity software like Word. Gaming is only one of the many things that I do on a computer and I don't need a 1200 watt power supply to do that! My next computer build will be pretty powerful compared to what the average computer user has. I plan to have a pretty good processor and a good amount of RAM but that is because I plan to use it as a lab environment to study with. I want something that will be powerful enough to run virtual machines for a test virtual network, and also to be able to do video editing. Adding a mid-range video card to that might help with video editing but it will mostly be there for my down time when I want to play a game.
My video card has become a "second" criteria component instead of a "central" component in my computer build. I think a lot of people either neglect or over emphasize their video card choices when building/buying a computer. At full load the 1060 doesn't use an unreasonable amount of power and when it is at rest it doesn't use hardly any at all. The price for a 1060 isn't crazy high, the card isn't huge for a midsize tower and it won't heat up a room. The 1060 for me is that perfect middle that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend for any build.
