Packaging

The Card

The ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 3060 Ti uses a huge triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution. Unlike past generations, the bulk of the card's RGB bling has been moved towards the top-edge of the card as those parts of the card are more readily visible in a typical windowed case. When viewed from the front, you'll feel like the shroud is smothering the heatsink underneath. This is intentional as the three Axial-Tech fans direct all of their airflow axially, onto the heatsink. The shroud opens up along the sides and top, while the backplate has large vents that guide airflow from one of the fans straight through.


Dimensions of the card are 32 x 14.5 cm, and it weighs 1828 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and two HDMI 2.1—an additional HDMI over the FE. Interestingly, the USB-C port for VR headsets, which NVIDIA introduced on the Turing Founders Editions, has been removed—guess it didn't take off as planned. The DisplayPort 1.4a outputs support Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2a, which lets you connect 4K displays at 120 Hz and 8K displays at 60 Hz. Ampere can drive two 8K displays at 60 Hz with just one cable per display.

Ampere is the first GPU to support HDMI 2.1, which increases bandwidth to 48 Gbps to support higher resolutions, like 4K144 and 8K30, with a single cable. With DSC, this goes up to 4K240 and 8K120. NVIDIA's new NVENC/NVDEC video engine is optimized to handle video tasks with minimal CPU load. The highlight here is added support for AV1 decode. Just like on Turing, you may also decode MPEG-2, VC1, VP8, VP9, H.264, and H.265 natively, at up to 8K@12-bit.

The encoder is identical to Turing. It supports H.264, H.265, and lossless at up to 8K@10-bit.


Unlike the Founders Edition, which uses the NVIDIA 12-pin power connector, ASUS uses standard PCIe power plugs. The card uses two 8-pin power inputs, which are specified to provide up to 375 W in power.


The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti does not support SLI. Only the RTX 3090 has very limited SLI support.


This BIOS switch lets you toggle between the default (Performance) BIOS and a "quiet" BIOS, which runs the fans much quieter, at slower speeds with higher temperature, and also reduces clocks slightly.


Two fan headers near the back of the card can be used to connect case fans to the graphics card. These fans will now run in sync with the graphics card fans—stopped when idle and at increasing speed correlating to the GPU temperature. Since the graphics card is the primary heat source in most computers, this makes a lot of sense and helps keep noise levels down.

Teardown

ASUS's thermal solution uses seven heatpipes. The main heatsink not only cools the GPU, but also provides cooling for memory chips and VRM circuitry.


To protect against sagging, a metal frame provides additional stability for the card.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.