Packaging

The Card

The Gigabyte RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC Pro is a very long design using standard PCIe-slot height, which will be useful in height-limited cases. The cooler shroud and backplate are made out of plastic.


Dimensions of the card are 29 x 11.5 cm, and it weighs 964 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include two standard DisplayPort 1.4a and two HDMI 2.1. 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, Gigabyte uses standard PCIe power plugs. The card uses one 8-pin and one 6-pin power input, which are specified to provide up to 300 W combined.


Gigabyte is including a dual-BIOS feature with their card. You may switch to the silent BIOS for reduced noise output. Looks like the backplate was designed by a different team than the PCB—there's quite some distance between the label and the switch.


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

Teardown

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


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. Note how Gigabyte included a modular power plug assembly here. It can easily be swapped out for a dual 8-pin, or anything else for other cards using the same PCB design.