Palit RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC Review

1. Introduction2. Palit RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing6. Control7. Cyberpunk 20778. F1 20209. Gears 510. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint11. Red Dead Redemption 212. Watch Dogs: Legion13. Clock Speed14. GPU Frequency Response15. Temperatures16. Acoustics17. Noise-Normalised Temperatures18. Power Consumption19. Overclocking20. Closing Thoughts21. View All Pages

Despite launching at the beginning of the month, we are yet to look at a custom RTX 3060 Ti graphics card – the subsequent launches of first the AMD RX 6900 XT and then Cyberpunk 2077 kept our attention elsewhere. That changes today however, as we assess the Palit RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC. With a hefty factory overclock and a power target that is 40W higher than the reference spec, what can this card offer to the mid-range market?

In terms of its appearance, the Palit RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC may look familiar, and that's because it shares a very similar design to the RTX 3080 GamingPro OC that we reviewed a couple of months ago. It's not quite identical though, while the cooler has also – understandably – been stripped back slightly as the 3060 Ti is a lower-power chip.

Still, increasing clock speed by 135MHz compared to the Founders Edition is no mean feat, and it will be interesting to see how that affects the thermals and noise levels of this card. We also test seven games, including Cyberpunk 2077, to see if the GamingPro OC can offer a meaningful performance increase over the Founders Edition.

 

GPU	RTX 3090	RTX 3080	RTX 3070	RTX 3060 Ti	RTX 2080 SUPER
SMs	82	68	46	38	48
CUDA Cores	10496	8704	5888	4864	3072
Tensor Cores	328	272	184	152	384
RT Cores	82	68	46	38	48
Texture Units	328	272	184	152	192
ROPs	112	96	96	80	64
GPU Boost Clock	1695 MHz	1710 MHz	1725 MHz	1665 MHz	1815 MHz
Memory Data Rate	19.5 Gbps	19 Gbps	14 Gbps	14 Gbps	15.5 Gbps
Total Video Memory	24GB GDDR6X	10GB GDDR6X	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
Memory Interface	384-bit	320-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	936 GB/Sec	760 GB/Sec	448 GB/Sec	448 GB/Sec	496.1 GB/sec
TGP	350W	320W	220W	200W	250W

The RTX 3060 Ti is the first Ampere GPU to launch which wasn’t announced in the September livestream event. Just like the RTX 3070, however, it uses Nvidia’s GA104 GPU, but a cut-down version of that silicon. That means the RTX 3060 Ti incorporates 38 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), and thanks to Ampere’s new SM structure with its two FP32 datapaths, each SM houses 128 CUDA cores, giving a total of 4684.

Ampere also places one RT core, and four Tensor cores, in each SM, giving a total of 38 RT cores and 152 Tensor cores. This is accompanied by 152 texture units, and 80 ROPs which are now housed directly within each graphics processing cluster (GPC), with 16 ROPs per GPC, and 5 GPCs in total for RTX 3070.

Nvidia's reference spec for the RTX 3060 Ti sees a rated boost clock of 1665MHz. The GamingPro OC is a factory overclocked mode though, with a rated boost clock of 1800MHz.  We test real-world clock speed behaviour later in this review.

For the memory, Nvidia is using the same configuration as the RTX 3070. That means it sports 8GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 memory, operating over a 256-bit bus, for total memory bandwidth of 448 GB/Sec.

Lastly, for total graphics power, Palit has set a power target of 240W for the GamingPro OC, which is a 40W increase of the reference specification.

The Palit RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC ships in a dark box, with an image of the graphics card visible on the front. On the back, some technical specifications are highlighted in different languages.

Inside, there's not much in the way of accessories, with just a user manual and a dual 6-pin to 8-pin power adaptor.

Looking at the card itself, yes it is using the same shroud design as the RTX 3080 GamingPro OC. This means it's made almost entirely of matte black plastic, but there is a metal grille that sits on top of the central and outer-most fan. This is screwed on top of the plastic and is purely for aesthetics.

It also uses the same triple-fan setup, with three 85mm fans that use semi-transparent fan blades. Personally, I don't think it is the best looking graphics card ever made, but I don't think it's ugly either, and it is certainly very colour-neutral.

By using the same shroud as the RTX 3080 model, this 3060 Ti GamingPro OC is relatively large for a GPU of this calibre. It measures 294 x 112 x 60 mm, so it is certainly quite long. Palit has ensured the height of the card is no taller than the PCIe bracket however, so it is a relatively narrow design.

The front side of the card is mostly left bare, with just the GeForce RTX branding printed in white text.

As for the backplate, this is the primary difference between the 3080 and 3060 Ti GamingPro OC models. Instead of a metal backplate, Palit has opted for plastic here, and I do find this disappointing – 3060 Ti isn't a budget GPU, and this is Palit's top of the line offering, so it doesn't sit too well with me that the company has ditched metal in favour of a plastic backplate. In my opinion, it doesn't look or feel as good, while it's also not going to help with any heat dissipation from the back of the PCB.

We can also see two 8-pin power connectors, which is more than enough for the 240W power target of this card, while display outputs consist of 3x DisplayPort 1.4a, and then 1x HDMI 2.1.

 

Looking now at the PCB, we can see Palit has opted for a 10-phase VRM for the GPU, using a UPI uP9512R controller. The memory VRM is 2-phase, using the UPI u1666Q controller.

Palit uses On Semi's NCP302150 MOSFETs for GPU power delivery, which are rated for 50 A, but Sinopower SM7342EKKP MOSFETs are used for the memory.

We can also note the use of Samsung GDDR6 memory modules, rated at 16Gbps.

Just like the RTX 3080 model, the heatsink is covered by a large die-cast aluminium alloy plate. This plate contacts with the memory chips as well as the VRM componentry. Under that plate, Palit uses two fin stacks, connected by 4x 6mm heatpipes, so this is two less than the 3080 GamingPro OC. The GPU die contacts with a separate baseplate, sitting above those four heatpipes.

Driver Notes

• All Nvidia GPUs (except RTX 3060 Ti) were benchmarked with the 457.09 driver.
• RTX 3060 Ti was benchmarked with the 457.40 driver supplied to press.
• All AMD GPUs (except RX 6000) were benchmarked with the Adrenalin 20.11.1 driver.
• RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT were benchmarked with the Adrenalin 20.45.12.1 driver supplied to press.
• RX 6900 XT was benchmarked with the Adrenalin 20.45.01.14 driver supplied to press.

Test System

We test using the a custom built system from PCSpecialist, based on Intel's latest Comet Lake-S platform. You can read more about it over HERE, and configure your own system from PCSpecialist HERE.

CPU	Intel Core i9-10900K Overclocked to 5.1GHz on all cores
Motherboard	ASUS ROG Maximus XII Hero Wi-Fi
Memory	Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3600MHz (4 X 8GB) CL 18-22-22-42
Graphics Card	Varies
System Drive	500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2
Games Drive	2TB Samsung 860 QVO 2.5″ SSD
Chassis	Fractal Meshify S2 Blackout Tempered Glass
CPU Cooler	Corsair H115i RGB Platinum Hydro Series
Power Supply	Corsair 1200W HX Series Modular 80 Plus Platinum
Operating System	Windows 10 2004

Comparison Graphics Cards List

• Gigabyte RTX 3090 Eagle OC
• Nvidia RTX 3080 FE 10GB
• Nvidia RTX 3070 FE 8GB
• Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti FE 8GB
• Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti FE 11GB
• Nvidia RTX 2080 Super FE 8GB
• Nvidia RTX 2080 FE 8GB
• Nvidia RTX 2070 Super FE 8GB
• Nvidia RTX 2060 Super FE 8GB
• AMD Radeon VII 16GB
• AMD RX 6900 XT 16GB
• AMD RX 6800 XT 16GB
• AMD RX 6800 16GB
• AMD RX 5700 XT 8GB
• AMD RX Vega 64 8GB

Software and Games List

• 3DMark Fire Strike & Fire Strike Ultra (DX11 Synthetic)
• 3DMark Time Spy (DX12 Synthetic)
• 3DMark Raytracing Feature Test (DXR Synthetic)
• Control (DX12)
• Cyberpunk 2077 (DX12)
• F1 2020 (DX12)
• Gears 5 (DX12)
• Ghost Recon: Breakpoint (Vulkan)
• Red Dead Redemption 2 (Vulkan)
• Watch Dogs: Legion (DX12)

We run each benchmark/game three times, and present mean averages in our graphs. We use OCAT to measure average frame rates as well as 1% low values across our three runs.

Fire Strike is a showcase DirectX 11 benchmark for modern gaming PCs. Its ambitious real-time graphics are rendered with detail and complexity far beyond other DirectX 11 benchmarks and games. Fire Strike includes two graphics tests, a physics test and a combined test that stresses the CPU and GPU. (UL).

3DMark Time Spy is a DirectX 12 benchmark test for Windows 10 gaming PCs. Time Spy is one of the first DirectX 12 apps to be built the right way from the ground up to fully realize the performance gains that the new API offers. With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, Time Spy is the ideal test for benchmarking the latest graphics cards. (UL).

Starting with 3DMark benchmarks, the 3060 Ti GamingPro OC is only 2% faster than the Founders Edition when looking at Fire Strike. That increases to 3% for Fire Strike Ultra, and 4% in Time Spy.

Real-time ray tracing is incredibly demanding. The latest graphics cards have dedicated hardware that’s optimized for ray-tracing. The 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test measures the performance of this dedicated hardware. Instead of using traditional rendering techniques, the whole scene is ray-traced and drawn in one pass. The result of the test depends entirely on ray-tracing performance. (UL).

Ray tracing performance for the GamingPro OC is essentially unchanged compared to the Founders Edition. We see just a 1% difference in 3DMark's feature test, which is less than 1FPS.

Control is an action-adventure video game developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by 505 Games. Control was released on 27 August 2019 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. (Wikipedia).

Engine: Northlight Engine. We test using the High preset, with 4x MSAA, DX12 API.

Looking at our first game of the day, Remedy's Control, the GamingPro OC is able to use its higher clock speed to outperform the Founders Edition by 5% at 1440p. Bear in mind though, that's a difference of just 3FPS.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a 2020 action role-playing video game developed and published by CD Projekt. The story takes place in Night City, an open world set in the Cyberpunk universe. Players assume the first-person perspective of a customisable mercenary known as V, who can acquire skills in hacking and machinery with options for melee and ranged combat. Cyberpunk 2077 was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Stadia, and Xbox One on 10 December 2020. (Wikipedia)

Engine: REDengine 4. We test using the Ultra preset, DX12 API.

 

While we don't yet have full comparison data for Cyberpunk 2077, we can see the GamingPro OC comes in 4% faster than the Founders Edition at 1440p. Again, bear in mind this is only a real-world difference of two frames.

F1 2020 is the official video game of the 2020 Formula 1 and Formula 2 Championships developed and published by Codemasters. It is the thirteenth title in the Formula 1 series developed by the studio and was released on 7 July 2020 for pre-orders of the Michael Schumacher Edition and 10 July 2020 for the Seventy Edition on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One. (Wikipedia).

Engine: EGO. We test using the Ultra High preset, DX12 API.

Next up is F1 2020, and this game sees the GamingPro OC average 142FPS at 1440p resolution. This is a lead of 5FPS compared to the Founders Edition, or another 4% difference in Palit's favour.

Gears 5 is a third-person shooter video game developed by The Coalition and published by Xbox Game Studios for Xbox One, Microsoft Windows and Xbox Series X. It is the fifth installment of the Gears of War series and the sequel to Gears of War 4. The ultimate edition was released on September 6, 2019, while the standard edition of the game was released worldwide on September 10, 2019. (Wikipedia).

Engine: Unreal Engine 4. We test using the Ultra preset, with Best Animation Quality (instead of Auto), DX12 API.

Gears 5 is more of the same, with the GamingPro OC hitting 95FPS on average, putting it both 3FPS, and 3%, ahead of Nvidia's Founders Edition at 1440p.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint is an online tactical shooter video game developed by Ubisoft Paris and published by Ubisoft. The game was released worldwide on 4 October 2019, for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, (Wikipedia).

Engine: AnvilNext 2.0. We test using the Ultra preset, with AA disabled, Vulkan API.

 

Moving onto Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, this game bucks the trend somewhat, with the GamingPro OC barely any faster than the Founders Edition at 1440p. The difference between the two cards is a single frame, or just 1%.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a 2018 action-adventure game developed and published by Rockstar Games. The game is the third entry in the Red Dead series and is a prequel to the 2010 game Red Dead Redemption. Red Dead Redemption 2 was released for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in October 2018, and for Microsoft Windows and Stadia in November 2019. (Wikipedia).

Engine: Rockstar Advance Game Engine (RAGE). We test by manually selecting Ultra settings (or High where Ultra is not available), TAA, Vulkan API.

 

As for Red Dead Redemption 2, the GamingPro OC uses its clock speed advantage to deliver an extra two FPS compared to the Founders Edition, making it 3% faster at 1440p.

Watch Dogs: Legion is a 2020 action-adventure game published by Ubisoft and developed by its Toronto studio. It is the third instalment in the Watch Dogs series, and the sequel to 2016's Watch Dogs 2. Legion was released on October 29, 2020 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Stadia. (Wikipedia).

Engine: Disrupt. We test using the Ultra preset, DX12 API.

Finally, we come to Watch Dogs: Legion. This title sees the GamingPro OC hit 66FPS on average at 1440p, giving the Palit card another 3% advantage over the Founders Edition.

Here we present the average clock speed for each graphics card while running the 3DMark Time Spy stress test for 30 minutes. We use GPU-Z to record the GPU core frequency during the Time Spy runs. We calculate the average core frequency during the 30 minute run to present here.

As we have alluded to throughout the review, the GamingPro OC is able to outperform the Founders Edition thanks to its higher operating clock speed. Over the duration of our 30-minute stress test, the GPU averaged 1983MHz, which is almost 100MHz faster than the Founders Edition.

Following on from our look at average GPU clock speed, here we present a series of charts, comparing the frequency response of the GamingPro OC and the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition.

GamingPro OC Clock Speed vs Founders Edition

GamingPro OC Clock Speed Against Temperature

For our temperature testing, we measure the peak GPU core temperature under load. A reading under load comes from running the 3DMark Time Spy stress test for 30 minutes.

In terms of out of the box thermal performance, the GamingPro OC proved to be an exact match for the Founders Edition, with a peak GPU temperature of 69C, alongside the steady-state result of 68C. This is a very solid result for the GamingPro OC – it may be a larger card than the Founders Edition, but it is also running with a higher power target, so we can't complain here.

We take our noise measurements with the sound meter positioned 1 foot from the graphics card. I measured the noise floor to be 32 dBA, thus anything above this level can be attributed to the graphics cards. The power supply is passive for the entire power output range we tested all graphics cards in, while all CPU and system fans were disabled. A reading under load comes from running the 3DMark Time Spy stress test for 30 minutes.

While stock thermal performance may be identical to the Founders Edition, noise levels are a little higher. Not by a lot, with the GamingPro OC hitting 39dBa compared to 37dBa for Nvidia's design, but that difference is noticeable to the ear. It's still a very quiet card, mind, just not as quiet as the Founders.

Following on from our stock thermal and acoustic testing, here we re-test the operating temperature of the GPU, but with noise levels normalised to 40dBa. This allows us to measure the efficiency of the overall cooling solution as varying noise levels as a result of more aggressive fan curves are no longer a factor.

Given the GamingPro OC is already pretty close to that 40dBa noise level, there isn't much thermal performance to be gained when tuning the fan curve. We only needed to increase the fan speed from 1800rpm up to 1890rpm to produce 40dBa of noise, and accordingly GPU temperatures only dropped by a single degree. This puts noise-normalised thermals 4C above the Founders Edition, but again, we can't forget the GamingPro OC is also running a higher power target.

We measure system-wide power draw from the wall while running the 3DMark Time Spy stress test for 30 minutes.

We also use Nvidia PCAT to measure power draw of the graphics card only, with readings from both the PCIe slot and the PCIe power cables combined into a single figure. This provides us with significantly more accurate data to work with as it is measuring only the GPU power, and not total system power which is a fundamentally imprecise measurement.

With total graphics power rated at 240W, we saw the GamingPro OC average 244W power draw over the duration of our stress test. This is a pretty significant increase over the Founders Edition, to the tune of 27%, so clearly the efficiency of this GPU has been reduced somewhat, given actual performance gains were between 1-5%.

We had reasonable success overclocking the GamingPro OC. We pushed the power limit to 112%, and upped the GPU clock speed by 110MHz. We also added 1100MHz to the GDDR6 memory, bringing speeds to 16.2Gbps.

That overclock resulted in a 6% boost to frame rates in the three games we retested at 1440p – F1 2020, Gears 5, and Watch Dogs: Legion.

Power draw, meanwhile, increased to 272W, which is an 11% increase over stock.

Nvidia launched the RTX 3060 Ti at the beginning of the month, with both AMD's RX 6900 XT and Cyberpunk 2077 launching in the intermediary period. That means we've had to wait for our first look at a custom RTX 3060 Ti, but the wait is over with this review of Palit's RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC.

Palit has increased the power target with the GamingPro OC, from 200W per the reference spec, up to 240W for this factory overclocked model. That allows the GPU to run consistently faster than the Founders Edition, by almost 100MHz based on our testing.

That may not be a huge amount, but it resulted in performance gains of up to 5% in the games we benchmarked. Averaged across our test suite however, at 1440p the GamingPro OC is 3% faster than the Founders Edition, so we're not really talking much of a difference there, particularly when taking the 27% increase to power draw into account.

As for Palit's cooler, this didn't prove to be much of an improvement on the Founders Edition, if at all. It's hard to make a true apples-to-apples comparison as the GamingPro OC draws significantly more power, but thermal performance was identical between the two, though the GamingPro OC did run a couple of decibels louder out of the box.

Once we noise-normalised to 40dBa, the Founders Edition ran 4C cooler, but again that's with a lower power output. In a nutshell, the GamingPro OC is clearly a capable design, keeping temperatures low with very reasonable noise levels. It's not a clear improvement over the Founders Edition though, but the cards are very much trading blows.

Overclocking the GPU also proved to be relatively successful, as we were able to add 110MHz to the GPU core and 1100MHz to the GDDR6 memory, resulting in a 6% boost to frame rates in the titles we re-tested at 1440p.

All in all, the Palit RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC is a decent card. I wouldn't say it was clearly superior to the Founders Edition, but it's not inferior either – they just have slightly different priorities in terms of power and noise levels. Ordinarily, our main criticism would be the MSRP of £449 here in the UK, as that's £80 more than the baseline MSRP, while it's also just £20 below RTX 3070's MSRP of £469.

The problem there is, of course, there's simply no stock, so prices everywhere are through the roof. Just the other day I saw 10+ RTX 3070s appear online, priced at £650 each, and within an hour they were all sold out. In that world, paying £450 for a decent RTX 3060 Ti like this doesn't seem nearly so bad.

Of course, all being well, there will actually be a good supply of GPUs sooner rather than later, and if 3060 Tis do start appearing for £369, it would be very tough to recommend spending another £80 for the Palit GamingPro OC. Until that happens though, these cards will sell out anyway, irrespective of the high MSRP.

At the time of writing, the GamingPro OC is not even available for pre-order, but it is listed on Overclockers UK HERE.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

Pros

• Sub-70C operating temperatures.
• Up to 5% faster than the Founders Edition, 3% faster on average.
• Overclocked reasonably well.
• Colour-neutral design.

Cons

• Less efficient than Founders Edition.
• Plastic backplate.
• £449 MSRP would be very steep (if 3060 Tis were available for £369).

KitGuru says: Palit has produced a decent card with the GamingPro OC. It hasn't blown our socks off, but if you can get your hands on one, it will do a solid job.

Become a Patron!