Packaging

The Card

Palit's card uses a plastic shroud and plastic backplate. While the card does feel a bit plasticky, visually the company did a great job, making the best use of the manufacturing capabilities of injection molding, which allows for more complex shapes. The card is held completely in black, and the backplate is matte.


Dimensions of the card are 24.5 x 12 cm, and it weighs 585 g.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4 and one HDMI 2.1.

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.


The card has one 8-pin power input. This configuration is rated for up to 225 W of power draw.


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

Teardown

The fan assembly can be replaced separately.


Palit is using three heatpipes on their cooler, which is a really simple design. It does manage to cool the memory chips on the VRM circuitry, too.


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