Packaging

The Card

For their RTX 3060 Ti, MSI reused the design of their GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio. The card is dominated by black with some gray highlights. The three fans are 95 mm in diameter. On the other side is a backplate.


Dimensions of the card are 32 x 14 cm, and it weighs 1451 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and one 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, MSI 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.

Teardown

MSI uses six heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU surface. The main heatsink also provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


Near the top of the card, a metal bracket is attached the the PCB and IO shield, which improves torsion strength of the card to protect against sagging.


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