NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition Review

GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Delivers The Goods for $399

We knew the launch of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition was inevitable as the internet has been flooded with photos and benchmarks from the card for the past month. NVIDIA doesn’t talk about unannounced products, but thankfully that all changes today as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has been officially announced by NVIDIA. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is an exciting graphics card since it is priced at $399 with performance faster than the Geforce RTX 2080 Super! That sounds pretty good considering the 2080 Super launched in 2019 for $699!

This is the very first Ampere GPU powered graphics card for mid-range gaming desktop PCs since it is priced at $399. That makes is $100 less than the Geforce RTX 3070 ($499) and $200 less than the GeForce RTX 3080 ($699). It also happens to be the same $399 price point that the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER was introduced at in the summer of 2019.

If $399 is still out of your price range and you still want an Ampere based card you’ll have to wait a bit longer for future graphics cards to come to market. NVIDIA seems to be doing a top down release for the RTX 30 series and we fully expect them to have a GeForce RTX 3060 model at a later date.

For this price point the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has 4864 CUDA cores, which is over twice the CUDA cores that the RTX 2060 SUPER has. Each SM has 128 CUDA cores and there are 38 SMs enabled on the GA104 ‘Ampere’ GPU used on this model. GA104 is built using Samsung’s 8nm NVIDIA custom process and is also used on the GeForce RTX 3070 series, so this is a scaled-down version of that GPU. The typical boost clock of the card is 1665MHz and the 8GB of GDR6 memory runs at 7000 MHz on a 256-bit bus for 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

You have 152 3rd Generation tensor cores, 38 2nd generation RT cores, 152 texture units and 80 ROPs. You are looking at 16.2 TFLOPs of shader performance and the RT Cores deliver the equivalent of 31.6 TFLOPs of performance. This brings a combined 47.8 effective TFLOPs of performance while ray tracing. You also have 129.6 Tensor TFLOPs with the new sparsity feature. The Total Graphics Power (TGP) of the 3060 Ti Founders Edition is 200 Watts – up slightly from 175 Watts on the 2060 Super model from last generation.

The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti also supports NVIDIA Reflex and AI-enhanced NVIDIA Broadcast just like the GeForce RTX 3070, 3080 and 3090!

Legit Reviews received the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition graphics card to review. The retail packaging for this model is the same as all of the GeForce RTX 30 series cards that we have seen to this point, so it should be familiar to most of our readers by now.

With the top lifted off the 3060 Ti Founders Edition you see that NVIDIA is once again sticking to the flow through GPU cooler design that was introduced with the RTX 30 series cards. The design works with your chassis cooling system to pull in fresh air and push warm air out of the case.

Under the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition card you’ll find a small box that contains a quick start guide along with the 1x PCIe 8-pin to 1x 12-pin adapter. Yes, NVIDIA is sticking with the 12-pin adapter and the rumors that they were moving to a traditional 8-pin adapter on any of the Founders Edition models was false.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is 2-slot graphics card that measures 9.5-inches in length (242mm) and 4.4-inches (112mm) in width. You shouldn’t have any issues fitting this in any desktop PC case on the market. This also happens to be the same size as the GeForce RTX 307o Founders Edition that uses a similar GA104 GPU. This card is a lighter color gray than the 3070 Founders Edition though, so you can visually tell them apart from one another.

The right fan pushes air up through the card towards the natural top of the PC case towards where one usually places a rear chassis exhausts. The left fan brings cool air in from the bottom of the case and pushes hot air out of the vented mounting bracket vents.

When you flip the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition card over you can see the ‘flow through’ design and how the right fan blows across a fin-stack that has several heatpipes in it.

Actually, here is a bit of a better shot that shows the fans and the heatpipes while holding up the card.

When it comes to display connections you’ll find three DisplayPort 1.4a with DSC 1.2a connectors and a single HDMI 2.1 with DSC 1.2a connector. HDMI 2.1 is a nice addition as it supports 8K60 and 4K120 with a single cable.

The RTX 3060 Ti uses the 7th Gen NVENC encoding engine and the 5th Gen NVDEC engine. This means that AV1 decode support is offered on this card along with support for MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264, H.265 (HEVC), VP8, and VP9. So, the connectivity on the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti isn’t lacking by any means.

Here is a closer look at the top of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition graphics cards. You can see the mini 12-pin power connector in the middle along the top edge of the card.

The 3060 Ti card has a Total Graphics Power (TGP) rating of 200 Watts and NVIDIA recommends a 600W or greater power supply for the RTX 3060 Ti.

Lastly, here is a look at the bottom of the graphics card that you’ll never see once it is installed.

Let’s take a quick look at the test system and then see how the RTX 3060 Ti performs!