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.

Zotac's Twin Edge sticks with the reference clock speeds and power limit; the company does offer the Twin Edge OC should you want a factory overclock. In our testing, the Zotac card matches the Founders Edition almost exactly. While it may be a tiny bit slower, the differences are mostly due to random variation and production variances. The RTX 3060 Ti beats the 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%, and 38% over 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 see an RX 6700 Series that will go head-to-head with the RTX 3060 Ti soon.

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 the 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 raytracing enabled and at maximum details—just check out the Average FPS page, where the card scores over 144 FPS on average. You can only expect frame rates with e-sports titles to be higher still.

Raytracing performance on RTX 3060 Ti is comparable to other Ampere cards. Of course, there is still a significant performance hit from enabling raytracing, but it's much smaller than on AMD, which introduced raytracing just weeks ago. For example, RTX 3060 Ti raytracing performance is comparable to the RX 6800 non-XT with DXR raytracing enabled—a card that's otherwise 20% faster in rasterization. Of course, there are only a few raytracing titles out there, but the new game consoles are using RDNA2 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, though they are working on something similar.

Zotac uses a simpler cooler design and heatsink than the other RTX 3060 Ti cards tested today, but their card matches NVIDIA's MSRP of $400, or at least tries to. Unfortunately, the cooler seems a little bit weak for the heat output of the RTX 3060 Ti, and Zotac didn't choose optimal fan settings. They focused too much on beating the temperature of the Founders Edition and thus had to raise fan speed too much. While temperatures are fine with 72°C, noise levels are simply too high with 42 dBA. If you have a weak heatsink, try finding a good balance between temperatures and noise, don't shoot for unrealistic goals. Why Zotac removed the idle-fan-stop capability is a mystery to me, too. NVIDIA made fan-stop standard on the GeForce RTX 30-series, as did AMD on the Radeon RX 6800 series. Every other custom design I've tested has fan stop, yet Zotac decides to scrap that functionality. If they fear their card might overheat in idle, alright, remove fan stop, but run the fan REALLY slow, not at 30% since the outcome is 30 dBA in idle. While good in 2015, it is completely unacceptable nowadays. On the other hand, there are plenty of gamers who play with a headset on, so they won't hear the fan noise at all.

While NVIDIA is using their new 12-pin power connector on the Founders Edition, Zotac is sticking with a standard 8-pin PCIe—good. As mentioned before, they didn't increase their cards power limit, which makes sense given the weak heatsink. Surprisingly, the card still consumes slightly more power than the Founders Edition. I suspect it's because Zotac also scrapped two power phases, which reduces voltage conversion efficiency, but saves a few dollars.

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.

According to Zotac, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge will retail at $400, matching the NVIDIA Founders Edition. If you've read through this review, you'll be aware that it's simply no contest. As it has a significantly better cooler, the Founders Edition is so much quieter. Also, the VRM is a little bit better, which makes me wonder about the pricing structure. Somehow, I suspect Zotac didn't cheap out to increase their margins, but simply to be able to match FE pricing at all. 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. Just like everyone else is forced to sell their cards at higher prices, Zotac did their best to make a card as cheap as possible to appeal to the large crowd looking for the cheapest RTX 3060 Ti in shop listings. I only wish they had tuned the fan better and included fan stop—it could be an interesting card with those in tow.