Overall and Final Verdict
Like with all of the Founders Edition cards, the RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition hits the nail on the head when it comes to its overall build quality. The all-metal construction which is cast not just stamped steel feels like a tank and completely covers the entire card. Nvidia’s heatsink exposed design which has one fan on each design is a complete departure from what anyone else is doing and looks great. Where a lot of the aftermarket cards have that “gamer” look, the Founders Edition designs look a little more mature. It may not be what everyone wants, but I’m glad that Nvidia is providing the option. The RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition doesn’t have the darker grey finish like the 4070 and higher have, like what Nvidia did with the 3000 Series, this model has a silver finish with the front having a machined finish that ends up looking great. Nvidia has also kept the design into a relatively small form factor that sticks within 2 slots and doesn’t stick up past the standard PCI height. It isn’t a small form factor card, but these days all video cards are huge and they have avoided that here. The main downside for the Founders Edition version specifically is that they are normally only available from limited locations, namely Best Buy. I wish you could get them from any online store. Beyond that the only physical issue I would like to see improved on is the 12VHPWR connection sticking directly up, I’ve mentioned it with other 4000 Series cards, but having it at an angle like they did on some of the 3000 Series cards would make wiring cleanly easier, take up less room, and avoid the possibility of the connection being strained which we now know if you aren’t careful doing that can cause the connection to melt in some situations.
The cooler performed shockingly well in my testing, especially when it comes to noise. Its fans are at the top of the chart in fan speeds when turned up but they managed to keep things quiet enough to be down at the bottom of the charts in all of our noise tests. For temperatures, it isn’t a world-beater, but it still does well. That has a lot to do with the overall efficiency of Ada. The RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition’s power draw was impressive at 201 watts at peak and 166 on average across all of our power tests. That combined with its performance has its overall efficiency up ahead of anything from the previous generations but it wasn’t ahead of any of the current-gen cards.
As far as performance goes, the RTX 4060 Ti, when tested at 1080p which is where Nvidia is targeting, runs right with last generations RTX 3070 but from AMD the RX 6750 XT does have 5 FPS on it on average across our tests. The problem you will run into with the RTX 4060 Ti is that if you go beyond 1080p up to 1440p or 4k the performance in comparison to the 3070 or even the 3060 Ti drops. Ada has its huge L2 cache which takes a lot of load off of the memory bus and that works really well. But because of that they have gone down to a 128-bit memory bus which works great at 1080p but that and the 8GB of VRAM start to get to their limits at the highest resolutions. That isn’t to say that in our testing 1440p or 4k wasn’t playable, it was. But if you are looking longer term and considering upgrading to a higher resolution monitor before your next video card upgrade, there are going to be better options that will offer that flexibility better. That said 1080p is still the most popular resolution by a HUGE margin and that is going to still be the case for a very long time. The RTX 4060 Ti also adds in DLSS 3 capabilities which in our testing gives huge performance improvements in the games that support it. Even in older DLSS 2 games the 4060 Ti saw bigger improvements than last generation's cards. I was also surprised with the compute performance, I expected it to be similar to the RTX 3070 but in Blender and Passmark’s GPU Compute test, it was outperforming the RTX 3070 Ti and running close to the RX 6800 XT.
In the end, the RTX 4060 Ti is in an interesting spot in the market. At its intended resolution it performs well. But like with the RTX 4070, AMD’s last generation of cards being marked down cause trouble when it comes to just per raster performance. DLSS 3 and its ray tracing capabilities help compete there. But once you get out past 1080p the performance drop brings this a little too close to the last generation 3060 Ti for me. That said for me, this might be the ideal card for my compact SFF LAN rigs. Its low power draw helps keep things cool and doesn’t require a giant card and I know for sure that I’m not going beyond 1080p for my LAN rig for a long time now because I don’t have any interest in dragging a larger monitor to events.
Live Pricing: HERE
