ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Video Card Review
A look at NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Clock Speeds
Since this is our very first Geforce RTX 3060 Ti that we have received from a board partner we wanted to take a look at clock speeds. For this we simply ran 3DMark Time Spy and recorded the entirety of the benchmark run. We then took the log file from that run and charted the results.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition
Base Clock: 1410MHz
Boost Clock: 1665MHz
GDDR6 Memory Clock: 1750MHz
ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3060 Ti OC Edition
Base Clock: 1410MHz
Boost Clock: 1755MHz
GDDR6 Memory Clock: 1750MHz
The ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3060 Ti OC has a 90MHz higher boost clock on paper, but we aren’t seeing that on this one application. The NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3060 Ti is clearly boosting higher and able to hold those clock speeds for pretty much the duration of the benchmark run. The Founders Edition card is able to nearly maintain 2 GHz for the entirety of the run and that is impressive. It looks like we won the silicon lottery on that card.
We then took the entire 165 second benchmark run shown in the first chart and found the minimum, average and maximum clock speeds for that run. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders edition topped out at 2040 MHz, which is 120 MHz higher than the TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3060 Ti partner card. Oddly enough the average difference is also 120 MHz across the entire run.
One would expect that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition card would have lower clock speeds while in use since it does on paper, but that is not how it works. NVIDIA says that are not cherry picking or binning the best chips for their own cards and it is all just a matter of luck. They are producing a massive number of Ampere GPUs for board partners to use on GeForce RTX 3060 Ti cards and said that we will see more board-to-board variation because the bin is so massive compared to other GPUs.
So, what did the cards actually score while running 3DMark Time Spy?
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition
ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3060 Ti OC Edition
The 3060 Ti Founders Edition came in with an overall score of 12,380 points and reached a temperature of 64C during that one benchmark run. The ASUS TUF Gaming 3060 Ti finished with an overall score of 11,771 points and reached a temperature of 57C during that one benchmark run. That puts the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition card score about 5.2% faster. We only have two 3060 Ti cards to play around with and test, but it seems like the performance variance between cards is going to be significant for this series.
Power Limits
The ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce 3060 Ti comes with a default board power limit of 200 Watts. If you wanted to download overclocking utilities you can adjust the board power limit within a defined range that can be unique to each model of a graphics card. ASUS allows users to increase the power limit up to 110% or 220 Watts. This is identical to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition card. The ASUS ROG STRIX GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has a default board power limit of 240 Watts and that can be increased to 135% of 325 Watts. Raising the power limit on the card did not change the clock frequency on our card in the tests above as that is something we tried out as a solution.