Every GPU launch cycle we go and get excited about the biggest and best cards in the market and the flagship cards like the RTX 3090 are exciting. But they are often beyond what people are looking to spend and beyond what a lot of people need if not gaming at high resolutions. So as Nvidia fills out their product stack, the cards that people are waiting for are farther down. Like the RTX 3060 Ti that is launching today. While the latest-gen cards, in general, are extremely hard to find still, Nvidia is finally starting to let loose the cards that fill the middle of the range that. Even right now four and a half years later, the GTX 1060 dominates the Steam hardware usage charts at 10.9% and the top 15-20 are almost all in that same xx50-xx70 range. I’m excited to see what Ampere does and to see what people looking to upgrade in that range can look forward to.

Product Name: Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition

Review Sample Provided by: Nvidia

Written by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

What’s the RTX 3060 Ti all about

The RTX 3060 Ti is based on the same GA104 GPU that the RTX 3070 used, which is based on the Ampere architecture which all of the 3000 series cards are based on and is the successor to Turing. It is built using an 8nm process from Samsung which is an improvement from the 12nm that Turing used. That alone is enough to make big improvements in performance, power usage, and cooling. But Ampere goes well beyond that. Ampere includes new third-generation Tensor Cores as well as new second-generation Ray Tracing Cores. They also changed how the normal programable shader which handles the 32-bit floating-point and 32-bit integer calculations are done. Ampere added a new data path that allows the integer32 portion to now also handle floating-point calculations if needed which can double the number of floating-point calculations possible. Graphics, as well as compute operations both, rely on the 32-bit floating-point as do modern shaders. Ray Tracing denoising shaders also benefit from the speedups as well.

The new second-generation ray-tracing cores have the ray-triangle intersection throughput doubled which improved the ray-tracing cores RT-TFLOPS from 21.7 on Turing to 31.6. Then on the Tensor core they now automatically identify and remove less important DNN (deep neural network) weights, processing the network at twice the rate of Turing.

So where does the RTX 3060 Ti land with current and past cards? Well, Nvidia is saying that it is faster than the RTX 2080 SUPER. So to compare specifications I included the 2080S along with the RTX 2060 SUPER which is the last generation equivalent. I also included the RTX 3070 which is the next step up on this generation and shares the same GPU, only the 3060 Ti is slightly cut down. The 3060 Ti has 38 SMs compared to the 46 on the 3070. This gets it 4864 CUDA cores which is a crazy number when you compare it with both the 2060S and 2080S or the GTX 1060 that I imagine at 4 and a half years old will have a lot of owners looking to upgrade to the RTX 3060 Ti. That GTX 1060 had 1280 CUDA cores.

The RTX 3060 Ti does change things up when compared to its GA104 based brother the RTX 3070. They have one full GPC turned off as well as one TPC which has a pair of SMs to reach the 38 SMs. The drop in total SMs matches up with the CUDA cores with both being a drop of 17%. But for the ray-tracing cores and the Tensor cores the RTX 3060 Ti has a larger drop of 44%, down to 152 tensor cores and 38 of the new gen 2 RT cores. As for clock speed, the RTX 3060 Ti matches closer with the old RTX 2060 SUPER than with the RTX 2080 SUPER and the RTX 3070 which were higher, it has a boost clock of 1665 MHz. It has the same 8GB of GDDR6 for VRAM, not the GDDR6X that the 3070 has and it runs at 7000 MHz as well but through a 256-bit interface where the RTX 3070 has a 320-bit interface. This makes a huge difference in total memory bandwidth, as you can see with the 3070 reaching 760 GB/s and the RTX 3060 Ti reaching 448 GB/s which matches the 2060 SUPER. The RTX 3060 Ti has a TGP of 200 watts which is a huge drop as well, which is nice to see but still more than the old 2060 SUPER.

For every review, I always double check the specifications listed against our sample using GPUz. This is just to confirm that we don’t have any inconsistencies which for the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition GPUz has the boost clock at 1665 MHz which matches Nvidia’s specifications. I also do this to document the driver used, which in this case was the pre-launch driver provided by Nvidia and is listed as a beta driver. Our BIOS version is also listed, for reference if problems come up in the future.

Packaging

The RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition has the same packaging as the RTX 3070 Founders Edition, except for the model name on the front of the box. This includes the black background and the silver stripes. Around back they have a sticker with a basic specifications breakdown including dimensions, power requirements, power connections needed, and windows requirements. They also list off what you get in the box as well. I still always prefer having packaging with a picture of what is inside, but I do like Nvidia’s consistency with their Founders Edition card packaging. The box doesn’t even say that it is a Founder Edition.

The best part about the packaging though is how when you pull the top off you are greeted with the card right up on top without any static protective bags. It's displayed like jewelry in its foam tray. The lid has foam inside as well to help keep it safe. Then up under the RTX 3060 Ti FE you have a box with the documentation and accessories. This includes a quick start guide and a support guide. Then there is also a warning card telling you that you need to use the included power adapter to avoid damage and potentially voiding the warranty.

Speaking of the power adapter, this is the same version that comes with the RTX 3070 Founders Edition. It has the new 12-pin power plug at one in and a traditional PCI 8-pin at the other end. If you look close in the 12-pin you can also see that only half of the pins are there, which helps avoid any issues if you somehow accidentally use this in the RTX 3080 or RTX 3090. The new 12-pin design is more compact, which you can see that it ends up being smaller than the old 8-pin, even with more pins.

Card Layout and Photos

The RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition may look familiar to you if you have been keeping up with the Nvidia launches. That is because it looks nearly the same as the RTX 3070 Founders Edition with its normal dual axial fan layout. It has the shroud-less design that Nvidia has used on all of the 3000 series cards which has the heatsinks exposed to the outside with the black fins. The fin layout also gives us a clue as to the airflow as well. They use an S-shaped shroud that directs the air from everything on the right side of the left fan up and out the top. The right fan is similar with it being directed down. The fans have 9 blades with an outer ring that gives them strength and helps with static pressure. Then I the center the metal centercaps have a darker finish that matches the color of the fans, leaving just the S-shaped shroud in silver the only bright part of the card. This is also the main change to the design, the 3070’s shroud had the same layout but had a darker finish.

The RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition, like the RTX 3070, actually fits the old “standard” in sizing as well with it being 240mm long, only two slots thick, and not extending past the top of the PCI bracket. The higher-end cards have gotten huge and SFF builds are going to suffer in the future, so I am happy to see that this at least will be an option. I should also point out not long ago we were begging for ITX length cards and now here we are just happy when cards fit the old standard of a normal card.

Looking around on the edge is where you will see most of the thick metal S-shaped shroud. Up on top the silver finish (which reminds me of the silver Nvidia used on their old FE and reference cards) dominates with just the small section of black fins in the middle and the GeForce RTX branding near the end. The logo isn’t backlit, the RTX 3060 Ti FE doesn’t have any lighting. Then in that center section of fins, they have slipped in the 12-pin power connection which fits up against the PCB and isn’t angled like on the RTX 3080. This means that the included adapter is going to stick right up as well, so even with the normal card height, you will have to deal with that. The end of the card has two screws filling the holes added for anti-sag mounting which is mostly used in GPU servers. Then down on the bottom, you have a matching small black fin set venting near the center as well.

The back of the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition has a thick metal backplate that has a grove design machined into it that matches the exposed fins. They have the actual model name here for branding which is filled in with white but is surprisingly small compared to what everyone else is doing. I would love to see this model name on the top edge and then have the backplate have the more generic GeForce RTX branding. I like showing off what model you have out on the top edge but not many cards do it. Then the main feature of the back is down at the end where the shorter PCB ends and Nvidia has the heatsink fins from the front exposed all the way through with a blow through design for most of the second fan. If you look closely you can even see the fan as well as the heatpipes they are using to pull the heat out to this heatsink.

The end of the card has what is now the standard layout of three DisplayPort connections and one HDMI 2.1 port. The VirtualLink Type-C connection of the past gen was short-lived sadly and DVI seems to be dropped now in these more middle of the range cards that used to get it. The bracket does have a section of etched logos and serial number information which is a cool way to hide it and make it easier to see when the card is installed. Then a large vent takes up the rest of the end. I would love to see the bracket be black to match the rest of the card and to match more builds, but it is at least slightly tinted.

For those wondering just how different the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition is compared to the RTX 3070 Founders Edition, I did get pictures of them together. They have the exactly same cooler with the color of the S-shaped shroud being the only difference.

Test Rig and Procedures

Test Rig

CPU: AMD Ryzen 3900X

Motherboard: Asus Crosshair VIII HERO WiFi

Memory: G.Skill Trident Z Royal 3600MHz 16-16-16-36

Storage: Corsair MP600 2TB

Cooling - Noctua NH-U12S

Power Supply - Corsair AX1200w

Case - Primochill Wetbench

OS - Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

Synthetic Benchmarks

As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially 

The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition ended up right where Nvidia had suggested it would be, outperforming the RTX 2080 SUPER but behind the new RTX 3070. The gap between it and the 3070 is still very clear, as is the RTX 2080 Ti which performs similarly to the 3070 in all three tests.

The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. Here was similar to the Fire Strike results with the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition outperforming the 2080 SUPER once again. 9% faster in the Time Spy Extreme test and 4% in the regular Time Spy test. Looking farther down into the chart upgrading from the original 2060 SUPER would get you 37% of an improvement, 57% from the original RTX 2060, and if you avoided going with RTX two years ago the GTX 1660 Ti would get you an 88% improvement.

The last test was using the Unigine based Superposition benchmark and I tested at 1080p with medium detail and again at 1080p with the extreme detail setting. In the extreme detail setting the RTX 3060, Ti Founders Edition was once again out in front of the 2080 SUPER, but the gap here was very small, so small in fact that in the medium detail the 2080 SUPER was still faster.

VR Benchmarks

As for Virtual Reality, I love it but it is more demanding than traditional gaming. This is partially because of the resolutions needed to render for two eyes and because they render more than what is immediately visible. But also because of post effects to get the proper “fisheye” effect for it to look proper in your eyes with the HMD. You also have to have much higher expectations for frame rates in VR, skipping frames or lower FPS can cause motion sickness in VR. Because of that, I ran a few tests.

My first test was again in Superposition. This time I tested the VR Maximum and VR Future tests using the Vive resolution. Here the 2080 SUPER was two FPS faster in the VR Future test and 2 FPS again in the VR Maximum test as well.

The VRMark results backed that up again in the blue room test where the 2080 SUPER came in ahead 6 FPS but the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition was faster in the less demanding Cyan Room test by 2 FPS.

In-Game Benchmarks

Now we finally get into the in game performance and that is the main reason people pick up a new video card. To test things out I ran through our new benchmark suite that tests 9 games at three different resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4k). Most of the games tested have been run at the highest detail setting and a mid-range detail setting to get a look at how turning things up hurts performance and to give an idea of if turning detail down from max will be beneficial for frame rates. In total, each video card is tested 48 times and that makes for a huge mess of results when you put them all together. To help with that I like to start with these overall playability graphs that take all of the results and give an easier to read result. I have one for each of the three resolutions and each is broken up into four FPS ranges. Under 30 FPS is considered unplayable, over 30 is playable but not ideal, over 60 is the sweet spot, and then over 120 FPS is for high refresh rate monitors.

So how did the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition perform? Well, 1080p performance is great with 10 of the 16 results coming in over 120 FPS and the other 6 are all in the 60-119 FPS range. Now 1440p is what Nvidia had the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition targeted at in the documentation they shared with us and it does still do surprisingly well there as well with 5 in over 120 FPS and 10 over 60. There is one under 60 FPS which was Total War: Three Kingdoms at the Ultra detail setting at 57.9 FPS which isn’t too far off the mark. 4K on the other hand is where the big dropoff is but even then there are still 8 games that were over 60 FPS. Then 7 were playable but not smooth and one wasn’t playable at all under 30 FPS.

Just going through comparing the claim of the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition being faster than the RTX 2080 SUPER does hold up across almost all of our game tests. Total War Three Kingdoms hated the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition for some reason and had it down under the RTX 2070, even after retests in both 4K and 1440p but still did well at 1080p somehow. Beyond that, each of the rest of the charts could be a clone of each other, the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition was surprisingly consistent.

Compute Benchmarks

Now some people don’t need a video card for gaming, they need the processing power for rendering or 2D/3D production, or in some cases people who game also do work on the side. So it is also important to check out the compute performance on all of the video cards that come in. That includes doing a few different tests. My first test was a simple GPU Compute benchmark using Passmark’s Performance Test 9 and the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition outperformed the RTX 2080 Ti here and was well beyond the 2080 SUPER that it has been running within our other tests.

In Basemark I test with the DirectX12 setting and again with OpenGL. The RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition outperformed the 2080 SUPER in the DX12 test but in OpenGL, the 2080 SUPER edged out 300 points over it. The 2080 SUPER was faster than the RTX 3070 in that same test as well.

Blender is always my favorite compute benchmark because the open-source 3D rendering software is very popular and it isn’t a synthetic benchmark. Here I render two scenes and combine the total time it takes. The RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition finished the two tests in 139 seconds, just 8 seconds behind the RTX 3070 which is impressive. This was well beyond the RTX 2080 Ti which took 200 seconds for the same test. I also ran the same test again using Optix which utilizes the tensor cores which dropped the time for the two renders down to 78 seconds, 5 slower than the RTX 3070 and 25 faster than the 2080 TI.

RTX and DLSS

Being an RTX card I also like checking out the performance of some of Nvidia’s features. Namely the ray tracing performance and the performance improvements you can see by using DLSS combined with the tensor cores. In most of the tests, I’m only comparing a few of the RTX cards as well as a GTX 1080 Ti for comparison. But in the 3DMark Port Royal test, I have been tracking ray tracing performance in all of the RTX cards as well as a few of the GTX cards introduced into the mix as well. Here the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition nearly matched once again with 119 points between the two. The gap between the two cards and the RTX 3070 as well as the 2070 below them is clear.

I then jumped into game tests, this time with the just recently released Watch Dogs: Legion. For this one, I wanted to get an idea of the performance you will see when taking advantage of Nvidia’s RTX and DLSS features. Here I tested with both on, just RTX on, and with neither on. I was surprised the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition kept up with the 3070 in the combined test, but in the RTX only and no RTX or DLSS tests, it was back to where you would expect it to be. The main thing here though is that if you do want to use RTX, you can experience it with little drop in performance if you run DLSS with it.

Next, I wanted to check out the performance in Metro Exodus which I do our normal testing in as well. The RTX only results show that the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition dopes gain a few FPS over the RTX 2080 SUPER, this is also there on the RTX and DLSS result to a lesser extent as well but in the DLSS only test the 2080 SUPER pulls back ahead with its more than double Tensor cores, even if they are the older gen 2 cores.

Next with Wolfenstein: Youngblood I tested at 4K using their Mein Lenen! Detail setting which is the highest detail. I tested with RTX on and just compared running with DLSS on the balanced setting and with it off entirely. The RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition saw a 41 FPS improvement when using DLSS. It wasn’t far from 60 FPS even without DLSS, but it pushed it well beyond with it on.

Next, I tested using a benchmark based on the game Boundary. For this one, I wanted to see how all of the different DLSS settings would perform, including turning it off completely. The 12.3 FPS with DLSS off wouldn’t be much fun, but with the DLSS performance setting the RTX 3060, Ti Founders Edition did manage to get up over 30 FPS while running at 4K. The gap between the three DLSS settings isn’t too large, around 5 FPS per setting.

The last tests were done in a benchmark based on the game Bright Memory. Here I wanted to check out the performance difference between different RTX settings. With the exception of the RTX low setting, the FPS gap between settings isn’t that large. But going from low to very high will cost you 15 FPS.

Cooling Noise and Power

For my last few tests, rather than focusing on in game performance, I like to check out other aspects of performance. These are also the most important ways to differentiate the performance between cards that have the same GPU. To start things off I took a look at power usage. For this, I use our Kill-A-Watt hooked up to the test bench to record the total wattage of the system. I ran two tests with the first using 3DMark Fire Strike to put the system under a load similar to normal in game performance. Here our test system with the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition in it pulled 382 watts in the 3DMark testing which is 26 watts less than the RTX 2080 SUPER and a few watts higher than our 3070 in the same test. The GPU only load test using the AIDA64 Stress Test was more consistent with the RTX 3070 pulling 334 to the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition’s 315.

My next round of tests were looking at noise levels. These are especially important to me because I can’t stand to listen to my PC whirling. Especially when I’m not in game and other applications are using the GPU. In my testing it seemed like there was either a delay or MSI has the fans not to come on until things reach around 61c but they stay on until things cool down to 43c. For my testing, though I first tested with the fan cranked up to 100% to get an idea of how loud it can get, then again at 50% to get an idea of its range. The RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition came in right in the middle of the pack at 59.3 for the 100% noise test which is right with the 2080 SUPER. This is especially impressive when we look at the RPM chart, which had the two fans running at 3751 RPM. The RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition runs extremely quiet for how fast the fans were running. The 50% test was extremely quiet as well at 37.4db. Then for the most important noise test, the load noise levels of the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition were great and down in the bottom section of our charts.

To finish up my testing I of course had to check out the cooling performance. To do this I ran two different tests. I used AIDA64’s Stress Test run for a half-hour each to warm things up. Then I documented what temperature the GPU leveled out at with the stock fan profile and then again with the fans cranked up to 100%. With the stock profile, the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition ended up at 68c which was the same as the RTX 2080 SUPER ironically and two degrees lower than the RTX 3070 which has the same cooler design. Cranking the fan up to 100% the temperature dropped down to 51c, again exactly with the RTX 2080 SUPER. The delta between the two was 17c which is right with most of Nvidia’s coolers.

While running the stock fan profile testing I also took the time to get a few thermal images so we could see what is going on. On the fan side, you can see that the fin section for the rearmost fan that is over the GPU is handling the majority of the cooling, venting out the top of the card. The other fan that vents down has some heat, but not nearly as much. The top-down point of view tells the same story with the center fin section being the only warm area up. The back of the card does show that the rear fan is doing its share, only it isn’t venting down, it is using the blow through design for most of its cooling. The backplate is transferring heat out away from the back of the GPU as well with a small warmer spot in that area.

Overall and Final Verdict

Nvidia continues to impress once again with the huge performance increases from the last generation of cards. The RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition gives the mid-range a kick in the pants with performance that beats the RTX 2080 SUPER which came out in July or 2019 or as we refer to it now, the before times. I love seeing what was close to flagship levels of performance just last year is now 4 cards down in their product stack. The RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition shares almost all of its cooler features with the RTX 3070, with just the S-shaped fan shroud being a lighter silver. This means it has the same build quality and construction, just like any Founders Edition card. Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards are always heavy, use thick all-metal construction, and are perfect weapons if the zombie apocalypse still manages to slip into 2020.

The dual-fan design looks amazing and takes a lot of the design features that Nvidia used on the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards, except for having one fan per side. This design looks more traditional with both fans on one side, but they do still have a short PCB which allows for the open blow through design at the end. Cooling performance is good but not spectacular, though it is better than the RTX 3070 given that they use the same cooler and the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition has a lower TGP. Power usage and cooling performance matched the RTX 2080 SUPER interestingly enough, but in a more compact card design.

The card design does use the new 12-pin power connection which I like. But the location due to the short PCB puts it right at the middle of the card facing up which means that the included adapter will be front and center in your system and with it not being angled like the RTX 3080/3090 it gets a little awkward as well. But as far as issues go, it is still a small one and I don’t think it will turn anyone away. My other issue is with card availability and writing this before the launch I have no way to know for sure if cards will be available. But up until now, with the other launches, the new cards have been extremely hard to find. Assuming that trend continues, that would be a downside to this card as well.

So are people going to want the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition? Well, Nvidia has it priced at $399 which is the same price that the RTX 2060 SUPER launched at. Given the performance, this makes the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition an amazing price. That only matters if you can find one of course, but near flagship performance at under $400 can make for an extremely powerful ~$1000 gaming PC or given the RTX 3060 Ti’s performance in Blender a big upgrade in someone’s work PC as well.

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.