Gigabyte RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC 8G Performance Review

Board partners have started to reveal their own custom design since the official launch of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and will be available for purchase from today onwards. Gigabyte has released a total of four models for this round – the AORUS GeForce RTX 3060 Ti MASTER 8G, GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GAMING OC 8G, GeForce RTX 3060 Ti EAGLE OC 8G, and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti EAGLE 8G.

We managed to get our hands on the RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC 8G for a quick run against the RTX 3070 Founders Edition to see just what kind of performance difference can we observe between both cards and if the RTX 3060 Ti is a better value for money.

Specifications

Unboxing

For the packaging, Gigabyte kept things simple as usual and most of the information on the features of the RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC 8G can be found at the back of the box.

On a side note, we did notice that Gigabyte is working on aligning the product naming for their graphics card and motherboard where MASTER and XTREME will be used exclusively for AORUS products. Not sure how will things turn out in the future but we hope that it’s not going to be too confusing for the end-users.

For the RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC 8G, Gigabyte didn’t include any extra accessories inside the box, so there are no accessories pack included for this one but a user’s manual which most people will just ignore.

The RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC 8G

Starting off with the design, we can see some similarities to the RTX 3070 Gaming OC and RTX 3090 Gaming OC in terms of design, but smaller. The RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC 8G is still equipped with a triple-fan cooler and Gigabyte’s usual alternate spinning middle fan to deliver better cooling performance than the general triple-fan cooler with all the fans spinning in the same clockwise direction.

Looking at how things go now, there’s a high chance that you might not be seeing any dual-fan cooler for the upcoming Gaming OC series cards because of the EAGLE series now being the more budget-friendly model for those who are looking for a more affordable option from Gigabyte.

The RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC 8G comes in a rather compact dimension for a card with a triple-fan cooler, measuring 282mm in length, and will only take up two expansion slots in your system. This makes it a really good choice for those who want to build a compact small form factor but powerful system because of its dimensions which can easily fit into quite a number of small form factor PC case you can find nowadays.

RGB element is kept at the minimal as usual, but you can still play around with it using Gigabyte’s RGB Fusion 2.0 software in case if you want to have some colors in your system or just want to disable all the lightings if you’re not a fan of RGB lightings, like me.

As for the power requirement, NVIDIA recommends a 600W power supply for the RTX 3060 Ti, but you can still get away with a 550W power supply if it’s a good 80 PLUS rated unit and not having a power-hungry CPU like the Intel Core i9-10900K or AMD Ryzen 9 5900X in your system. Unlike the Founders Edition RTX 3060 Ti which requires a 12-pin PCIe power connector, Gigabyte like the rest of the board partners has decided to stick with the usual 8-pin PCIe power connector for the sake of convenience.

My only dissatisfaction here is the position of the PCIe power connector, which Gigabyte decided to not doing it the same as what we’ve seen on the RTX 3070 Gaming OC 8G and RTX 3090 Gaming OC 24G. It’s not really a problem for most users but it will somehow annoy those who sought the perfect cable management look for their build.

Gigabyte also equipped the RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC 8G with a nicely designed metal backplate to serve as the support for the PCB. The cutout at the near end of the backplate acts similarly to the cooling design as the RTX 30 series Founders Edition cards, which allows the cooling fan at the near end of the heatsink to channel the heat off to the upper section of the PC case and let the case fan(s) handle the rest.

And for the display output, the RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC 8G offers a slightly different option than most of the cards we’ve seen nowadays. It has 2 x HDMI 2.1 and 2 x DisplayPort 1.4a for output, which will come in really handy for budget-oriented builds because most of the affordable display monitors you’ll find in the market will only come with a single HDMI and VGA port for input.

Test System Setup

For our games benchmark test, we’ve selected a number of AAA titles to run at its highest possible settings using the following setup under an ambient temperature of 31°C:

Games Benchmark (1080P)

Games Benchmark (1080P + Ray Tracing On)

Games Benchmark (1440P)

Games Benchmark (1440P + Ray Tracing On)

Games Benchmark (4K)

Games Benchmark (4K + Ray Tracing On)

Based on the results above, we can see that the RTX 3060 Ti is a pretty powerful card that easily fits right in the 1080P and 1440P gaming segment – 4K gaming is just too much for both cards. It’s not powerful enough to overtake the RTX 3070 but it’s still powerful enough to be able to deal with some of the most demanding AAA titles nowadays, which is great for users who are looking for an upgrade from the previous-gen GTX 10 series models.

Thermals & Power Draw

For this part, we’ve done our usual stress test with FurMark for 4 hours straight just to see how well the cooler can handle the heat. Despite its being smaller in size, the highest temperature recorded on the RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC 8G is only at 68°C, which is pretty reasonable as the fans are barely audible even from 100m away from the test system. If you’re not feeling comfortable with the temperature, you can increase the fan RPM using the AORUS Engine software.

The RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC 8G itself is drawing approximately 211W during full load, slightly lower than the 220W power draw on the RTX 3070 Founders Edition. Since the RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC 8G is technical an overclocked version of the RTX 3060 Ti, you can expect an even lower power draw from the base model RTX 3060 Ti EAGLE, which will probably be under 200W on load.

Final Thoughts

Performance-wise, the RTX 3060 Ti will perform 10-15% slower than the RTX 3070, depending on the games that you’re playing. There’s no denying that it’s a really powerful card for the 1080P and 1440P gaming segment but it’s not going to kill the RTX 3070 killer anytime soon if we were to compare its performance. Though that $100 difference does seem like a pretty good deal if you’re really going hard for the price over performance ratio because you’re not really losing a lot of performance right there.

As for the RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC, it’s not the most affordable option on the list but compared to the RTX 3070 Gaming OC 8G which is priced at RM 2899, its RM 2499 price tag is still pretty justifiable if we look at the thermal performance and gaming performance it can deliver. If the price tag is still beyond your allowed budget and you don’t mind the slightly lower performance, you can always go for the RTX 3060 Ti EAGLE base model which has an even lower price of RM 1969 and overclock it to achieve the performance that you desired.

Personally, I think that the RTX 3060 Ti is a great option to consider if you’re having difficulties in getting yourself an RTX 3070 due to the global shortage and all the scalpers out there who are selling it at a ridiculously high price.

Pros

• Excellent performance out of the box
• Excellent build quality
• Runs silently even during full load
• Come with two HDMI ports
• Compact design that can easily fit into most of the small form factor build

Cons

• The launch price is slightly more expensive than others

Subjective

• Location for PCIe power connector will slightly affect the look of your build