ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge Review

Name: ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge
Brand: ZOTAC

W1zzard

on Dec 1st, 2020,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: ZOTAC

(14 Comments) »

Introduction

ZOTAC today introduced its GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge graphics card, which leads the company's lean lineup of custom-design Ampere graphics cards based on this GPU. ZOTAC's strategy with performance-segment graphics cards has been to create frugal and compact graphics cards it can sell at prices close to the NVIDIA baseline. Frugal doesn't necessarily mean "cheap" as ZOTAC offers a free extended warranty upon product registration that is longer than most other brands' warranties. The RTX 3060 Ti Ampere is NVIDIA's most affordable GPU launched for this generation thus far and targets a much wider audience with its $400 starting price. It is designed to offer 1440p AAA gaming with raytracing. It's also designed to offer e-sports gaming at 1080p at higher refresh-rates, such as 144 Hz.

Much of the innovation with Ampere has been to make RTX-enabled gaming a lot more playable since real-time raytracing puts a heavy performance impact on your hardware. A by-product of this approach is that non-RTX (traditional raster 3D) performance is significantly higher for this generation, with NVIDIA claiming that the RTX 3060 Ti beats the previous-generation RTX 2080 Super, a $700 graphics card meant for exactly the same use-cases as this card. The GeForce Ampere architecture introduces NVIDIA's 2nd generation RTX technology that combines traditional raster 3D with raytraced elements, such as lighting, reflections, shadows, and global illumination; and with Ampere, even raytraced motion-blur.

The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is carved out of the same GA104 silicon as the recently launched RTX 3070, but with less of the chip enabled. It features 38 out of 48 Ampere streaming multiprocessors present on the chip, resulting in a CUDA core count of 4,864, more than double the 2,176 CUDA cores found on the RTX 2060 Super, which this GPU is designed to succeed. This also yields 152 Tensor cores, 38 RT cores, 152 TMUs, and 80 ROPs. The RTX 3060 Ti is endowed with the same exact memory configuration as the RX 3070, with 8 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface. This configuration results in 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The 2nd generation RTX technology combines new Ampere CUDA cores with concurrent FP32+INT32 math operations, 2nd generation RT cores with double the intersection performance and hardware for raytraced motion-blur effects; and 3rd generation Tensor cores that leverage DNN sparsity to increase AI inference performance significantly.

The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge is strictly two slots thick and full-height for maximum compatibility. There isn't any RGB bling, nothing too flashy. This card is targeted at gamers who just want an RTX 3060 Ti for its main use, to install and forget about. Keeping with the theme of maximum compatibility, the ZOTAC Twin Edge is among the few custom-design RTX 3060 Ti that comes with a single 8-pin PCIe power input, which should be more than sufficient for this GPU as its typical board power is rated at 200 W. The Zotac Twin Edge ticks at reference clocks and power limit. In this review, we put the ZOTAC RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge through its paces to tell you whether this is all you need for 1440p RTX gaming.

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
Zotac RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge	$400	4864	80	1410 MHz	1665 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 Zotac Twin Edge is the most compact custom design we're reviewing today. It is of standard PCIe slot height, which will be useful in height-limited cases.

Dimensions of the card are 22.5 x 11.5 cm, and it weighs 644 g.

Installation requires two 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, Zotac uses standard PCIe power plugs. The card uses one 8-pin power input, which is specified to provide up to 225 W.

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

Teardown

Zotac'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 metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. Note how it partially wraps around the card, which is nice.

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.