The ROG Strix is usually ASUS’ go-to design for their graphics card line-up in recent years but with some challenges across the way, the RTX 30 series launch also coincided with ASUS’s TUF Gaming line-up renaissance. Faced with multiple issues prior due to bad cooling, predominantly with AMD cards (which was blamed to poor AMD spec), ASUS’s GPU design team looks like they’re not going to face another humiliation.
The new ASUS TUF Gaming for RTX 30 have been received fairly well and has shifted the perception of the TUF Gaming line-up as a brand recycling attempt to a well-respected product line. We’ve reviewed the ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 3080 OC as well as the ASUS TUF GAMING RTX 3070 OC, both of which deliver incredible performance and value but most of all, impeccable cooling performance.
Today we have the NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti launching and we have 2 partner cards as well as the NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti for review. The RTX 3060 Ti aims to replace the RTX 2060 SUPER but offers performance that is faster than an RTX 2080 SUPER with a starting price $399. Featuring more than double the CUDA cores of an RTX 2060 SUPER at 4864 clocking in at 1665Mhz boost, the RTX 3060 Ti continues the story which has already been written by its higher-tier brothers: decent performance uplift across the board for less than their previous performance counterpart.
| RTX 3060 Ti | RTX 2060 SUPER | RX 5700 XT | RTX 2080 Ti FE | RTX 3080 FE | RTX 3070 FE | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Ampere | Turing | RDNA | Turing | Ampere | Ampere |
| Stream Processors/ CUDA Cores | 4864 | 2176 | 2560 | 4352 | 8704 | 5888 |
| Boost frequency | 1665Mhz | 1650Mhz | 2010 Mhz | 1635Mhz | 1710 MHz | 1725 MHz |
| Memory | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 11GB GDDR6 | 10GB GDDR6X | 8GB GDDR6 |
| Memory bus | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 352-bit | 320-bit | 256-bit |
The ASUS TUF GAMING RTX 3060 Ti also continues a narrative: ASUS’ TUF GAMING graphics card redemption arc. Featuring a large, triple fan cooler, the TUF GAMING RTX 3060 Ti shares the same fan configuration, shroud and backplate as its RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 brother. To reduce cost though, ASUS reconfigures the actual heatsink, reducing it in size as needed which means the TUF GAMING RTX 3080 will have a massive chunk of metal as a heatsink while the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti will have less.
The TUF GAMING RTX 3060 Ti features a heavily reduced heatsink array than the TUF GAMING RTX 3080 but is in no way inferior a cooler for its needs. As you can see in the image above, it still packs a decently large cooler.
As an OC model, the card we have for review features a factory overclock of 1755Mhz. I largely ignore this for the RTX 30 series cards given that for the majority of your gaming experience, these cards will be boosting past 1800Mhz. A factory OC may provide slightly better results with GPU Boost as well as manual overclocking.
The TUF GAMING cards are compatible with ASUS Aura Sync for lighting control. ASUS GPU Tweak II will be your software for GPU monitoring and overclocking.
