Palit GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC Review

Name: Palit GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC
Brand: Palit
Price: 450 USD

W1zzard

on Dec 1st, 2020,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: Palit

(1 Comment) »

Introduction

We have with us the Palit GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC, the company's premium custom-design graphics card based on NVIDIA's swanky new RTX 3060 Ti Ampere performance-segment GPU. The Palit GamingPro OC combines the RTX 3060 Ti with a powerful triple-slot cooling solution meant for a segment above, which aims to trade cooling performance for lower noise. As the most affordable RTX 30-series GPU at launch, the RTX 3060 Ti Ampere is designed to bring the 2nd generation RTX technology to a wider audience.

The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is designed to introduce 1440p gaming with RTX real-time raytracing enabled, as well as 1080p e-sports gaming with high refresh-rates of 144 Hz. NVIDIA is comparing the RTX 3060 Ti to the previous-generation RTX 2080 Super, a $700 graphics card that fits this bill exactly. The GeForce Ampere architecture heralds NVIDIA's 2nd generation RTX real-time raytracing technology, which combines traditional raster 3D with raytraced elements, such as lighting, reflections, shadows, and global illumination, and with Ampere, even raytraced motion-blur.

NVIDIA carved the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Ampere out of the same 8 nm GA104 silicon as the RTX 3070 by enabling 38 out of 48 streaming multiprocessors. This works out to 4,864 Ampere CUDA cores, 152 3rd generation Tensor cores, 38 2nd generation RT cores, 152 TMUs, and 80 ROPs. It features the same 8 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit memory interface as the RTX 3070. The 2nd generation RTX combines new Ampere CUDA cores that offer concurrent FP32+INT32 math operations with 2nd generation RT cores, which offer higher BVH traversal and intersection performance, along with new hardware that enabled 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 by an order of magnitude.

The Palit GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC comes with factory-overclocked speeds of 1800 MHz (compared to the 1665 MHz reference). This is backed by a close-to-reference custom board design that pulls power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors and looks to have been carried over from the company's RTX 3070-based GamingPro product. The cooling solution features a pair of aluminium fin-stack heatsinks with four nickel-plated copper heat pipes, which are ventilated by a trio of 90 mm fans. Palit is unsure about the actual market pricing of the RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC, but expect it to be around $440 or $450, possibly higher depending on the supply situation. I used $450 for the charts in this review.

GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Shader Units	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RTX 2060	$300	1920	48	1365 MHz	1680 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 5700	$330	2304	64	1465 MHz	1625 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
GTX 1080	$330	2560	64	1607 MHz	1733 MHz	1251 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5X, 256-bit
RTX 2060 Super	$380	2176	64	1470 MHz	1650 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX Vega 64	$400	4096	64	1247 MHz	1546 MHz	953 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1080 Ti	$650	3584	88	1481 MHz	1582 MHz	1376 MHz	GP102	12000M	11 GB, GDDR5X, 352-bit
RX 5700 XT	$370	2560	64	1605 MHz	1755 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070	$340	2304	64	1410 MHz	1620 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070 Super	$450	2560	64	1605 MHz	1770 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Radeon VII	$680	3840	64	1802 MHz	N/A	1000 MHz	Vega 20	13230M	16 GB, HBM2, 4096-bit
RTX 2080	$600	2944	64	1515 MHz	1710 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Super	$690	3072	64	1650 MHz	1815 MHz	1940 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060 Ti	$400	4864	80	1410 MHz	1665 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Palit RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC	$450	4864	80	1410 MHz	1800 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Ti	$1000	4352	88	1350 MHz	1545 MHz	1750 MHz	TU102	18600M	11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 3070	$500	5888	96	1500 MHz	1725 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800	$580	3840	96	1815 MHz	2105 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	23000M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800 XT	$650	4608	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	23000M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3080	$700	8704	96	1440 MHz	1710 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit

Packaging

The Card

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

Dimensions of the card are 29.5 x 11.5 cm, and it weighs 1029 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, Palit uses standard PCIe power plugs. The card uses two 8-pin power inputs, which are specified to provide up to 375 W combined.

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

Teardown

Palit's thermal solution uses four 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 plastic and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.

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.