NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti has been on the market since early summer and has established itself at the go-to choice for GeForce gamers in the midrange segment. GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is based on the NVIDIA AD106 graphics processor, which also powers several laptop GPU models—for desktop it's the first and only release so far. RTX 4070 non-Ti and RTX 4070 Ti are both based on AD104, RTX 4060 non-Ti uses AD107. As expected, RTX 4060 series cards are built using the NVIDIA Ada architecture, which not only brings improvements to efficiency and ray tracing, but also comes with the DLSS 3 Frame Generation feature, which is a game changer, especially in the lower-end segments, where reaching decent FPS matters more than anything else.

The ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Dual M.2 SSD in this review introduces a fascinating new capability. You can install an M.2 SSD in the graphics card, which not only provides connectivity and power, it also cools the drive. This is possible because NVIDIA designed their AD106 graphics processor with a PCI-Express x8 interface. This means that there's eight unused PCIe lanes from the x16 slot that just sit dormant on the RTX 4060 Ti. ASUS thought long and hard about this and came up with the card in this review. Four of the unused lanes get redirected to an M.2 slot on the graphics card. For this feature to work your motherboard must support PCIe bifurcation. This is a capability that lets the motherboard split a block of x16 PCIe lanes into smaller chunks and control them individually. While most AMD Socket AM5 motherboards support bifurcation, it's a pretty rare feature on most Intel boards. Actually nearly all ASUS Z790 motherboards don't support bifurcation (I tried on the Z790 Dark Hero). For ASUS specifically there's a long list here that you can refer to.

This means that the RTX 4060 Ti Dual M.2 really works best with AMD Ryzen systems, where the bifurcation is widely available, even on A620 and B650 motherboards. I did extensive testing of the M.2 feature and I'm happy to report that once supported, it just works, you can even boot from it. Just to clarify, installing an M.2 SSD will not increase your graphics card's VRAM. The M.2 SSD will behave exactly like an M.2 SSD that's installed in your motherboard, there is no additional features or capabilities, just because it's sitting on a GPU. What is different though, is that cooling is provided by the graphics card. ASUS was smart to use a reversed M.2 connector, so the hot surface of the SSD will make direct contact with the graphics card's main cooling solution, which can easily handle a few more watts of heat output.

Out of the box, the ASUS RTX 4060 Ti ships with the dual BIOS switch set to "Performance" mode, which runs the fan pretty aggressively and disables idle-fan-stop. I found the noise profile a bit loud, especially when compared to other RTX 4060 Ti cards on the market. No doubt, ASUS is worried about the M.2 SSD overheating, but I think they're just a bit too careful. In my testing, even with a Gen 5 SSD, the temperatures of the SSD were always well below thermal throttling. That's why I recommend you actually try to use the "Quiet" BIOS, which can be activated using a switch on the graphics card. Now the fans will stop completely in idle, desktop work and Internet browsing, for the perfect noise-free experience. Should GPU temperature go high enough, the fans will spin up, but run whisper-quiet, even at full load.

The management of the card's fans is exclusively handled by the NVIDIA GPU, just like on all other RTX 4060 Ti cards. However, the GPU is unaware of the nearby M.2 SSD and lacks information about its temperature, which means the fan speed is controlled solely based on the GPU temperature. In a perfect world, the GPU would have a mechanism to poll for the SSD temperature and adjust fan speed accordingly. Things would get even more interesting if the NVIDIA GPU had a PCIe bridge inside that provided connectivity for the SSD (via the GPU, not the host CPU). This would allow expansion of the card's VRAM—it could be just like your Windows pagefile for GPU memory. AMD experimented with such a solution for the professional space, but it never took off, probably because flash storage is around 100x (!) slower than the GDDR6 memory on the card.

The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti portion of the card is really just a regular RTX 4060 Ti and that's not a bad thing. There is no loss of performance from the use of the M.2 SSD. Out of the box the card comes with a tiny factory OC to a rated boost of 2565 MHz, which is a small 30 MHz clock increase over the Founders Edition frequency of 2535 MHz, or +1.2%. This turns into a sub-1% performance improvement—not sure if this really can be called "OC"—other custom designs aren't doing much better either, but that's just how OC SKUs work these days.

Averaged over the 25 games in our brand-new test suite, at 1080p resolution, the RTX 4060 Ti is able to match last-generation's RTX 3070 and beat the older RTX 2080 Ti by a small margin. The gen-over-gen performance improvement of the ASUS RTX 4060 Ti is only 10%, which is much less than what we've seen on the higher-end GeForce 40 cards. Compared to AMD's offerings, the RTX 4060 Ti can beat the RX 6700 XT by 6%, even though that card has 12 GB VRAM. AMD's Radeon RX 7700 XT is almost 20% faster than the RTX 4060 Ti, with very similar pricing. With these performance numbers, the RTX 4060 Ti can easily reach over 60 FPS in all but the most demanding games at 1080p with maximized settings. Actually, the RTX 4060 Ti will capably run many games at 1440p, too, especially if you're willing to lower a few settings here and there.

As expected, ray tracing performance of RTX 4060 Ti is clearly better than AMD's older cards, but the RX 7700 XT is able to match it on average. There's big differences between games though. With RT enabled, the RTX 4060 Ti will run out of memory at maximum settings in a few newer titles, which gives the 12 GB RX 7700 XT an advantage. It's still impressive how the RTX 4060 Ti matches the Radeon RX 6800 XT 16 GB in RT, which is positioned roughly two tiers above it. Still, I'm not sure if ray tracing really matters in this segment. The technology comes with a big performance hit that I find difficult to justify, especially when you're already fighting to stay above 60 FPS in heated battles.

Probably the most important selling point for the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation. The algorithm takes two frames, measures how things have moved in those two frames and calculates an intermediate frame in which these things moved only half the distance. While this approach is definitely not problem-free, especially when pixel-peeping at stills or slowed down video, in real-time it's nearly impossible to notice any difference. As you run at higher FPS and resolution it becomes even more difficult, because the deltas between each frame are getting smaller and smaller. Being able to double your FPS is a huge capability, because it means you can enable ray tracing for free, or game at higher resolutions. Of course you are limited to games with DLSS 3 support, of which there are currently around 50, mostly AAA titles, but not every title will support it. AMD has recently launched its FSR 3 Frame Generation technology, which works on all cards, including NVIDIA's but there's only three games that support the new tech.

GeForce RTX 4060 Ti comes with a 8 GB VRAM buffer—same as last generation's RTX 3060 Ti. There have been heated discussions claiming that 8 GB is already "obsolete," I've even seen people say that about 12 GB. While it would be nice of course to have more VRAM on the RTX 4060 Ti, for the vast majority of games, especially at resolutions like 1080p, having more VRAM will make exactly zero difference. While there are a handful of games in our test suite that show a loss in performance compared to the 16 GB card, even at 1080p, the remaining thousands of games will be perfectly fine. I think it's not unreasonable for buyers in this price-sensitive segment to to set textures to High instead of Ultra, for two or three titles. If you still want more memory, then NVIDIA has you covered. The RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB is available at $450 (or +$50), but I don't think the performance gains are big enough to justify the cost increase.

The ASUS Dual is quite short with just 23 cm, which ensures it will fit into all cases. We have seen dual-slot RTX 4060 Ti cards, the ASUS card is triple-slot, which should be no problem, because multi-GPU setups have been dead for many years, especially in this performance range. GPU temperatures are pretty good, and as mentioned before, I didn't encounter any high temperatures on the SSD either, even with a Gen 5 SSD. Noise levels with the default BIOS could be a bit better, but that's why there's a "quiet" BIOS option, which is definitely something I'd recommend you try while you monitor SSD temperatures.

NVIDIA made big improvements to energy efficiency with their previous GeForce 40 cards, and the RTX 4060 Ti is no exception. With just 160 W, the power supply requirements are minimal, any beige OEM PSU will be able to drive the RTX 4060 Ti just fine, so upgraders can just plop in a new graphics card and they're good to go. Performance per watt is excellent, which is the cornerstone for the low power consumption and easily-manageable heat output of the GPU. ASUS runs at the same 160 W default power limit as other cards, and the manual adjustment range pretty much matches the Founders Edition (176 W vs 175 W on the FE). This is actually a good thing, some value-oriented cards have their power limits locked. The M.2 slot is powered through the graphics card's 8-pin connector, so any SSD power consumption will eat into your GPU's power budget (I've verified this, it shows up in GPU-Z power monitoring). Given power levels of sub-10 W nearly all the time, this shouldn't pose any problem, it still would have been nice to see a small bump in power limit to account for that.

ASUS wants $440 for the RTX 4060 Ti Dual M.2 SSD, which is a $40 price increase over the base card without M.2 slot, or +10%. The cheapest PCIe to M.2 adapters cost around $10 and they work just as well, if you have a second PCIe x16 slot, but this solution does block some airflow and doesn't let the GPU thermal solution provide cooling for the SSD. You could also just use the M.2 NVMe slots that you have available on your motherboard, unless they are filled up already—like in my PC. Last but not least, a USB-to-NVMe adapter could be an option to expand the storage, but with lower performance offered, because the data has to travel over the much slower USB interface, through two additional controllers, which add latency.

I really like what ASUS has been doing with the RTX 4060 Ti M.2, and it would be nice to get more such options in the future, especially on higher-end graphics cards, but it seems unlikely that a graphics card manufacturer will put a $100+ PCIe bridge chip on their graphics card. What would be the ideal solution, is if the GPU makers AMD/NVIDIA/Intel gave up a little bit of die space to implement a PCIe bridge inside their GPU that provides external connectivity for an SSD. As mentioned before, this would open up a ton of new possibilities to enhance the GPU's capabilities. Generally speaking, RTX 4060 Ti is a decent card for 1080p and 1440p gaming, but it faces strong competition from AMD's Radeon RX 7700 XT, which comes at similar pricing, but offers slightly better raster performance, 12 GB of VRAM, but falls behind in power efficiency. If you have $550, then RX 7800 XT could be a good choice, beating the RTX 4060 Ti in both raster and RT.