Saturday, August 5th 2023
Gigabyte Quietly Launches Low Profile GeForce RTX 4060 Graphics Card
Low profile graphics cards have always been something of a niche market, but they've found homes in many HTPC builds over the years, especially passively cooled cards. Now Gigabyte has launched a rather odd looking low profile NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 based graphics card that simply goes under the name of GeForce RTX 4060 OC Low Profile 8G. The 182 x 69 x 40 (D x H x W) mm card still manages to pack in three fans and requires an 8-pin power connector to work, which somewhat unfortunately plugs in at the rear of the card, although there wouldn't have been too many other locations to place it. This means that this card might not work in some Mini-ITX builds, due to the card being too long once the power connector is plugged in.
The card width should've given away that we're looking at a dual slot card, which is also pretty obvious from the pictures. Gigabyte provides a full height and a low profile bracket with the card, which not all low profile cards have shipped with in the past, so this is a plus. Connectivity wise, the GeForce RTX 4060 OC Low Profile 8G comes with two DP 1.4a and two HDMI 2.1a ports, making this a card well suited for HTPC usage. Gigabyte has even overclocked the GPU from 2460 MHz to 2475 MHz, which seems quite pointless and is unlikely to bring any huge performance advantages over stock clock speeds.Update Aug 24th: During a recent meeting with Gigabyte we had a chance to go hands-on with their new RTX 4060 Low Profile card, here's some photos.
Sources:
Gigabyte, via VideoCardz
The card width should've given away that we're looking at a dual slot card, which is also pretty obvious from the pictures. Gigabyte provides a full height and a low profile bracket with the card, which not all low profile cards have shipped with in the past, so this is a plus. Connectivity wise, the GeForce RTX 4060 OC Low Profile 8G comes with two DP 1.4a and two HDMI 2.1a ports, making this a card well suited for HTPC usage. Gigabyte has even overclocked the GPU from 2460 MHz to 2475 MHz, which seems quite pointless and is unlikely to bring any huge performance advantages over stock clock speeds.Update Aug 24th: During a recent meeting with Gigabyte we had a chance to go hands-on with their new RTX 4060 Low Profile card, here's some photos.
138 Comments on Gigabyte Quietly Launches Low Profile GeForce RTX 4060 Graphics Card
The 4060 is disappointing, yes, but compared to LP options its a huge breath of fresh air.
Small fans that spins a lot yes, not hard to understand it !!
Replaced the fans on both cards and worked fine after that :)
Now whenever i plan to purchase new gpu card i always look for fan-stop feature and removable main cooler shroud for easy cleaning and fan replacement.
But, since i am restricted with gpu dimension because of HTPC case i will have to give up one of my criteria.
Unfortunately things are getting more restrictive if you are slim computer case user.
I have seen dead fans on cards, because people don't clean out the dust in their systems once in a while, which is the big fan killer, plus smoking next to your computer, which makes the dust stick really hard to things.
As some also mentioned, the precursors to this were the 1050 Ti and the 1650. So if the 4060 can replace them, then it's the successor to 50-series GPUs.
AMD won't be able to compete in this form factor this generation, because the 7600 is not as efficient as other 7000-series GPUs. Compared to the 4060, the 7600 is slower, more power hungry, and has the same PCIe limitation.
It's great that HTPCs finally have this much performance and VRAM available, but it's a bummer more VRAM isn't available. My HTPC is my only device connected to a 4K display. It's also a disappointing that a low-end GPU in this market used to be like $200 in 2023 dollars and now it's $300.
Due to dust and dirt ,cooling fins will lose their efficiency earlier because of their small size. Non fan-stop means ,fan will be forcing more stuff to cooling fins unnecessarily which accelerate dirt built-up. Cleaning is very difficult because shroud is not removable and openings between fans and plastic housing so tight it prevents you to use vacuum cleaner in a good way.
How many of us willing to remove all parts, thermal paste etc etc to make proper cleaning ?
Why not design the damn thing properly for customer who has no other choice in these segment and charge them with few bucks more ?
Anyways.. back to the news..
You have to make concessions in design to make cards small like this. Dont get so angry over it. If you cant remove 4 screws and apply thermal paste why on earth are you building PCs in the first place? LP cards like this are so simple to maintain a monkey can do it.
I've also never had one of these fans fail. The only fan that failed was a single slot fan on a HD 3450 many years ago. Fun pro tip: due to size constraints all these LP cards use the same retention mechanism. It is trivial to find a donor LP card, strip the heatsink off of it, and install it. I used to buy dead LP server cards and move the heatsinks onto LP desktop GPUS for quieter operation.
Wouldn't mind having Ada architecture sans RT (it's not much of use on lower-end SKUs anyway).
A GPU with 2048 CUDA cores and 6 GB 96-bit GDDR6 memory would be very appealing if it's PCIe-powered only.
Without RT, they might even bring the costs under 200$.
DLSS is really useful, though!
I mean, how much smaller you want your case to be, so that you are willing to sacrifice a potentially 4070 in ITX format?
About the cost, ok. Most of them are on the expensive side for the size and quality you get.
It's similar in performance to a RTX 3050, though. And you can get a 12 GB variant (if you start selling things from the house - TV, AC, your Batman comics collection). :roll:
Sorry, I'm just feeling funny (or that's what I like to believe).
Although my own pc 10 years old, i help my friends to build hi-spec pc s and repair if i can do it for fun, Free of charge. And i do similar things with my woodworking shop.
It just saddens me, when it comes to maintain and repair their stuff, most of the people worst than sea sponge.
Sometimes i get angry because most of these failures could have been prevented just by little bit better design. Sorry for the off-topic, I used to work on merchant ships for 20 years. I know how much energy and effort goes to carrying all these raw materials to build stuff around us.
www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-pci-express-performance-scaling-with-core-i9-13900k/28.html
www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-pci-express-scaling/27.html
www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-radeon-rx-6600-xt-pci-express-scaling/26.html
also, you can get used (mined) A2000s at much cheaper now (cheaper than a 4060 for sure), and they tend to be in good-to-excellent condition ...
so yeah
www.tomshardware.com/news/chinese-low-profile-rtx-3050-65w
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/asus-gtx-1650-low-profile.b7647
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/gigabyte-gtx-1650-low-profile.b7645
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/manli-gtx-1650-low-profile.b7643
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/msi-gtx-1650-low-profile.b7005
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/zotac-gtx-1650-low-profile.b6999
10 loss might to high. But above 5 % loss i will not say is impossible.
So this time getting a 4080 low profile is a huge advancement.
So the low-profile world seems pretty great compared to ITX. Although it'd be a lot better if there were more case and power supply options.