We have six reviews for you today: NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition, ASUS RTX 3060 Ti STRIX OC, Gigabyte RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC Pro, MSI RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio, Palit RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC, and Zotac RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge.

With the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, NVIDIA is finally pushing Ampere below the $500 price point, which makes it attractive to an even larger audience of gamers. The new RTX 3060 Ti is based on the same GA104 graphics processor as the RTX 3070, just with some rendering units disabled. The RTX 3060 Ti is targeted at definite 1440p gaming with 60 FPS and entry-level 4K at lower details or with DLSS enabled. Raytracing is a core focus of NVIDIA's Ampere lineup, too. The RTX 3060 Ti will offer a great RT experience at 1080p and 1440p in most titles.

Averaged over our test suite at 1440p resolution, we find that the RTX 3060 Ti beats the RTX 2080 Super by 3%, which makes it only 12% slower than the RTX 2080 Ti that did cost a fortune not long ago. The performance uplift over the RTX 2060 is a staggering 58%, 38% more than the RTX 2060 Super. The RTX 3060 Ti sits right in the middle of the AMD competition—the RX 5700 XT is 21% behind the RTX 3060 Ti and the RX 6800 is 20% faster, which suggests we'll soon see an RX 6700 Series that will go head-to-head with the RTX 3060 Ti.

With these performance numbers, the RTX 3060 Ti is an excellent choice for gamers using the 1440p resolution. It also has enough horsepower to handle 4K, but you'll have to reduce details a little bit in the most demanding games. Considering that price, this will be a reasonable tradeoff for many. I can also imagine plenty of 1080p Full HD gamers wanting the RTX 3060 Ti because it will give them enough FPS for high refresh-rate monitors, even with enabled raytracing at maximum details.

Raytracing performance on the RTX 3060 Ti is comparable to other Ampere cards. Of course, there is still a significant performance hit from enabling RT, but it's much smaller than on AMD, who introduced raytracing just weeks ago. For example, RTX 3060 Ti raytracing performance is comparable to the RX 6800 non-XT with RT on—a card that's 20% faster in rasterization. Of course, there are only a few raytracing titles out there, and the new game consoles are using RDNA 2 technology, so this might change in the future. NVIDIA also has DLSS, which uses upscaling to improve performance, a technology AMD does not have at all, although they are working on something similar.

NVIDIA's Founders Editions for Ampere feature stunning designs that could come right out the labs at Apple. For the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition, NVIDIA is reusing the exact same design as on the 3070, but fine-tuned the metal frame around the card. It's now a more silvery metal, whereas the RTX 3070 used dark gray with a hint of gold. I have to say I like the brighter frame much better—this is the most beautiful FE ever in my opinion. We were impressed by the cooling performance of the RTX 3070 FE, and the RTX 3060 Ti is no different. Under the hood, the cooler is the exact same, which of course means it will work even better because the RTX 3060 Ti is slightly lower on heat output than the RTX 3070. Just like the 3070, fan settings are perfect—the card runs at only 30 dBA with heavy gaming, which is very quiet, barely audible. Temperatures are fine, too, at 73°C. As our custom-design reviews of the RTX 3060 Ti show, these cards are having a hard time competing with NVIDIA's dual-slot cooler, even when using three slots. NVIDIA definitely got cooling right with Ampere, both in form and function, very nice job indeed. With Ampere, NVIDIA introduced idle fan stop on their Founders Edition, which previously was one of the biggest reasons for gamers to look at other brands. In idle, during desktop work, Internet browsing, and light gaming, the RTX 3060 Ti will turn off its fans completely for the perfect noise-free experience.

This generation of cards sees the introduction of the 12-pin Molex MicroFit 3.0 connector, which is used on the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition, too. I'm not happy with this choice at all. For a 200 W power design, it looks unnecessary—a single 8-pin would have been fine, and wouldn't have taken up that much more PCB space. Just like on the other Ampere cards, placing the power connector in the middle of the board makes clean cable routing difficult. What makes things slightly worse is that the connector is facing straight upward, away from the card; on the RTX 3080, it was angled, which made routing the cable easier. What I do have to praise NVIDIA for is their inclusion of an adapter with all Founders Edition cards, so you're ready to go without an additional purchase.

The RTX 3060 Ti improves power efficiency once again—by a few percent over RTX 3070 and 10+% over RTX 3080/3090. AMD has launched their new RDNA 2 Radeon cards just recently, which are doing a little bit better than Ampere in performance per watt; however, the RTX 3060 Ti can make up a bit of ground here, too. Just like for previous NVIDIA generations, power efficiency is the cornerstone for a successful product. If power draw were higher, heat output would go up, which would require a louder or larger cooler and a more complex PCB design, all of which increases production cost, too.

While there has been a lot of discussion on 10 GB VRAM for the GeForce RTX 3080, even more so considering AMD offers 16 GB on their cards, the RTX 3060 Ti will be perfectly fine with 8 GB. It offers substantially lower shading power compared to these "4K" cards, so the limiting factor will be the shading-rate capability, not the amount of memory. Next-gen consoles do have more memory, but their 16 GB is for the OS, game, and graphics combined, which means effective graphics memory is close enough to the 8 GB offered by the RTX 3060 Ti. I've been hearing good things from developers about the direct-to-GPU disk streaming capabilities of the new consoles, especially on PS5, which could reduce VRAM requirements considerably. Guess we'll have to wait and see. Should you ever feel VRAM is running out, just sell the RTX 3060 Ti and buy whatever card is right at that time.

NVIDIA is positioning the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition at $399, which is an extremely competitive price. At that price point, it offers price/performance comparable to the GTX 1660 Super, which has the best price/performance ratio of all NVIDIA offerings. It would also be a better deal than the Radeon RX 5600 XT. If you can find an RTX 3060 Ti at $400, then definitely go for it. I'm having my doubts, though. Looking at recent launches from both AMD and NVIDIA, it seems MSRP prices are a fantasy true for only the first batch, there to impress potential customers, with actual retail pricing ending up much higher. Looking at the other RTX 3060 Ti reviews today, we had a hard time getting price points out of many manufacturers, and what we got was substantially higher than $400, with the ASUS STRIX at $500, MSI Gaming X at $470, and Palit at $440+. From vendors, I heard that "the supply should be pretty good," but that "it also might not be enough for more than a few hours" or that "we might see $500 soon," so let's wait a few days and hope people will actually be able to buy this fantastic graphics card at reasonable pricing.