Introduction

The ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) STRIX GeForce RTX 3060 Ti OC is the company's top of the line custom-design graphics card based on the newly launched GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Ampere GPU by NVIDIA. Launching at the same price points as the RTX 2060 Super, the new RTX 3060 Ti is designed to offer 1440p AAA gaming with RTX raytracing enabled. NVIDIA's RTX real-time raytracing technology combines traditional raster 3D graphics with certain raytraced elements, such as lighting, shadows, reflections, illumination, etc., which significantly ups realism. Even these few effects are extremely compute-intensive to pull off in real time, so NVIDIA innovated fixed-function hardware to handle them.

Compared to the RTX 20-series Turing, the design focus with the RTX 30-series Ampere has been to improve performance in games with RTX enabled, which means the GPU's conventional raster 3D performance is significantly better, with NVIDIA claiming that the RTX 3060 Ti beats the RTX 2080 Super—a $700 previous-generation card for the same use case. The 2nd generation RTX technology combines new Ampere CUDA cores with concurrent FP32+INT32 math performance, 2nd generation RT cores which double the intersection performance over the previous generation, and add hardware for raytraced motion-blur effects; and 3rd generation Tensor cores that leverage the sparsity phenomenon in neural nets to increase AI inference performance significantly.



NVIDIA carved the RTX 3060 Ti out of the same 8 nm GA104 silicon as the RTX 3070. While the RTX 3070 nearly maxes it out, the RTX 3060 Ti is significantly cut down, featuring 38 out of 48 streaming multiprocessors physically present on the chip; 152 Tensor cores, 38 RT cores, 152 TMUs, and 80 ROPs. The memory setup is identical, with the card featuring 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface clocked at 14 Gbps. ASUS has significantly overclocked the RTX 3060 Ti from its reference 1665 MHz up to 1860 MHz.

The ROG STRIX RTX 3060 Ti features the company's latest generation ROG STRIX DirectCU III cooling solution, which looks like it's capable of cooling a GPU two segments above the RTX 3060 Ti. A large triple-slot aluminium fin-stack heatsink is ventilated by three Axial-Tech fans designed to guide all their airflow axially, onto the heatsink. The card features a much stronger VRM solution than reference, capable of supporting high power limits. The card is longer than the PCB underneath, which means much of the airflow form the third fan is guided through the card and directly out the vents on the backplate. ASUS is pricing the RTX 3060 Ti ROG STRIX OC at a steep $500, a 25% premium over the $400 baseline price, and exactly the same price as the RTX 3070 baseline. In this review, we explore whether the ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 3060 Ti is worth such a large premium.