I had done many tests to determine and confirm whether it's a hw or a sw issue. Tried replacing the thermal paste multiple times, reinstalling drivers using DDU, replacing my PSU, reinstalling OS and much more. I had listed down all the things I did on tom's hardware but I can't find that thread anymore, but that list had a lot more tests that what I described just now. And btw thanks for posting a reply worth replying to—unlike the rest of the replies on this thread.
Changing thermal paste is not going to help performance unless your card is thermal throttling. You might see a few degrees difference temperature-wise..
edit: what’s the rest of your system specs? It could be bottlenecking??? The 3gb variant of the GTX 1060 is not a great card (it’s not terrible though) , seeing as it has kind of a small amount of VRAM compared to other budget options nowadays.