Introduction

The Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC Pro is the company's premium custom-design graphics card based on NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3060 Ti "Ampere" GPU being launched today. Gigabyte brings to the table its iconic WindForce 3X cooling solution, RGB Fusion illumination, and a custom-design PCB geared toward overclocking. The meaty triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution is surplus to the cooling requirements of the 200 W RTX 3060 Ti, and so it trades this surplus in for low noise. The RTX 3060 Ti "Ampere" is designed to cater to the widest gaming audience yet with its starting price of $400, enabling 1440p gaming with RTX raytracing. In addition, it's designed to play 1080p games at high refresh-rates of 144 Hz.

NVIDIA's design goal with the Ampere architecture has been to vastly improve raytracing performance over the previous generation, essentially making RTX-enabled gaming at the advertised framerate possible. The company is extensively marketing the RTX 3060 Ti as the previous-generation RTX 2080 Super, a $700 graphics card for this exact use case, at a much lower starting price of $400. The GeForce Ampere architecture heralds NVIDIA's 2nd generation RTX real-time raytracing technology that combines traditional raster 3D with raytraced elements, such as lighting, reflections, shadows, and global illumination.



The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is based on the same 8 nm GA104 silicon as the recently launched RTX 3070. NVIDIA enables 38 out of 48 streaming multiprocessors physically present on the GPU, amounting to 4,864 Ampere CUDA cores, 152 Tensor Cores, 38 RT cores, 152 TMUs, and 80 ROPs. It comes with the same 8 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory as the RTX 3070 over the same 256-bit wide memory bus. The 2nd generation RTX technology combines new Ampere CUDA cores that offer concurrent FP32+INT32 math capability with 2nd generation RT cores, which offer higher performance, along with new hardware that enables raytraced motion blur; and the new 3rd generation Tensor core that leverages the sparsity phenomenon in deep-learning neural nets to improve AI inference performance significantly. NVIDIA leverages AI for its RTX denoiser and its DLSS performance enhancement.

As mentioned, the Gigabyte RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC Pro features the latest generation of the company's WindForce 3X cooling solution with a compound aluminium fin-stack heatsink and trio of fans optimized for low lateral turbulence, and since the card is longer than the PCB, much of the airflow from one of the fans flows through the card and out of vents on the backplate. Gigabyte has overclocked the RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC Pro to 1770 MHz, compared to the 1665 MHz reference. In this review, we put the card through its paces to see whether we have a new 1440p performance champion. Just like last time, Gigabyte hasn't responded to our "pricing?" email yet. Their RTX 3070 Gaming OC Pro had an MSRP of $570, or +$70 over reference, a 12% increase. So I'll use $450 throughout this review, but will update once we have more information on pricing.

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.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles or forum posts.



High-res versions are also available (front, back).