- You heard it here first, folks.
Nvidia's launching yet another 30 series GPU
that nobody's going to be able to find in stock.
But it's not all bad
because for the handful of gamers
who do get their hands on this thing at MSRP,
it is going to be one heck of a gameful Christmas,
because, spoiler alert,
the 3060 Ti is hella fast.
And I'll tell you all about it,
but first I'll tell you about our sponsor, TeamGroup.
TeamGroup's Dark Z Alpha DDR4 memory
is compatible with Ryzen 5,000
and you can win a computer that uses this ram
at TeamGroup's Christmas giveaway at the link below.
(energetic electronic music)
Scalpers aside,
I'd be lying if I said
I'm not super excited about these cards.
At $399, the MSRP,
the value they represent is substantial
for anyone with a PC
who's looking for a console alternative,
especially when you consider that,
according to Nvidia anyway,
it's faster than an RTX 2080 Super.
And you know what,
on paper anyway, I think I believe them.
It's got more than double
the previous gen RTX 2060 Super's CUDA cores,
and at just a 25-watt increase in rated power consumption.
In fact,
the core count is only about 20% lower than the RTX 3070
with specs that are otherwise pretty comparable.
Same eight gigs of GDDR6 memory, same bandwidth,
and just a few less ROPs.
You'd expect that to translate
into roughly 20% lower overall performance.
To put that theory to the test
we've gathered not only the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 2080 Super,
but the next steps up for both of these GPUs
and Team Red's latest and greatest
to see just how far
four Benjamins, theoretically, will get you.
Ooh.
Good thing we didn't pay for ours
because Christmas would have been completely ruined.
We've spoken with Nvidia
and our card is almost certainly defective,
but we're gonna keep going anyway
since the performance numbers look okay
and we can't get another one here in time.
We'll just have to skip some of our tests.
For traditional gaming,
"Shadow of the Tomb Raider" places the RTX 3060 Ti
firmly behind the 3070 and the 2080 Ti,
although worryingly for AMD it's ray-trace performance
roughly matches their $569 RX 6,800
and completely embarrasses it
in fully path traced "Minecraft RTX"
where the differences between the RTX cards
are actually slimmer than I would have expected.
"Wolfenstein: Youngblood" in traditional rasterizing
has our higher end cards pulling away from the 3060 Ti,
although we weren't able
to test ray-tracing performance here
due to that (clears throat) problem with our review sample.
Microsoft Great Equalizer, or "Flight Simulator",
makes short work of the 3060 Ti,
relegating it to console FPS status,
unless you're prepared to reduce your resolution
or your visual quality.
And finally "CS: GO" has the 3060 Ti
nearly beating out the 2080 Ti,
albeit with slightly worse frame pacing
if the 95th percentile minimums are anything to go by.
So it looks pretty great from a gaming standpoint.
As for productivity,
the RTX 3060 Ti I just straight up dropkicks the last gen,
even the 2080 Ti,
with performance that is surprisingly close to the 3070,
especially with the optics render
at sub 20 seconds for the BMW test.
And the spanking gets even more thorough
as we move on to V-Ray and OctaneBench
with only the RTX off results for the latter
dipping below the RTX 2080 Ti.
SPECviewperf finally has the 2080 Super
trading blows with the 3060 Ti,
with 3ds Max and Maya pulling off wins for the new card
thanks to the extra CUDA cores
and SolidWorks seeing better performance
out of the previous gen thanks to its higher clock speed.
Physically the founder's edition
looks pretty much exactly like the RTX 3070,
just with a pallet swap,
slight color change,
and that's from the cooler
right down to the new 12-pin connector,
which (sighs) I find a little bit frustrating.
The biggest reason for which
is that both the 3070 and 3060 Ti
are now using this special snowflake connector
that they have no practical need for whatsoever.
I mean it's not the end of the world.
The adapter is still included in the box
so it's not like it's gonna affect your ability
to plug the card into your power supply.
I just don't really know what the point is.
Maybe Nvidia hopes that if enough cards have this connector,
traditional PCI express power cables
will eventually disappear.
So far, nobody seems to be taking the bait.
Throughout our testing,
core clocks though were extremely stable
pushing past two gigahertz under most circumstances
to overtake the RTX 3070's clock speeds,
and this seems to be thanks in large part
to the fewer CUDA cores and, of course, the reused cooler,
which is just as potent.
Our 3060 Ti founders hit a peak
of just 71 degrees throughout our test,
which implies that there's a lot of thermal headroom
that remains to be exploited.
Average and maximum fan speeds
were also roughly the same between these two cards,
suggesting that unless there's bad thermal compound,
the 3060 Ti must be drawing a similar amount of power too.
Which it is.
Sitting at or below 200 watts most of the time
with momentary spikes as high as about 230 watts,
the 3060 Ti is just a bit lower than the RTX 3070
and surprisingly pretty close to the RTX 2080 Super.
I mean, Ampere is well known by now
for sucking back that juice,
but it's still surprising to see this kind of power draw
in a 60 class card.
And I'm sure it's gonna cause a headache or two
for at least some of you
who are trying to upgrade a prebuilt PC
or who skimped on your supply way back in the day.
Again though,
it's not like a crazy amount
and it's nothing that a single eight pin connector
couldn't have handled.
Now before our conclusion,
I want to address the elephant in the room.
Using the MSRP to review a product like this when we know
that it's unlikely to be available at that price
probably seems pretty disingenuous to some of you.
And I can see why people get mad about it.
But the truth is there is no conspiracy
where Nvidia is paying the press
to misrepresent the pricing or whatever.
We just don't really have a better way to deal with this.
When we review a product,
we can only work with the information
that we have at the time.
I don't know how much crazy people
are gonna pay to scalpers on eBay,
and I don't know how long these shortages are gonna last.
But the thing is this video is gonna be up forever.
Long after these cards drop back down
to earth-like prices.
So my best bet then is to just review it
from inside the bubble of how the world is supposed to work
and then offer the caveat that you might need to wait
in order to get the value that we're talking about here.
So with that in mind then, the conclusion.
Despite the power consumption,
the 3060 Ti at $399
is gonna occupy a very popular spot on shelves
from both mid-range gamers
and budget conscious professionals alike.
It's a great looking product.
It's fast, it's affordable,
it's got a ton of killer features
thanks to its RT cores and tensor cores
which unlock Nvidia's gamer-oriented AI goodness
like RTX Voice and Automatic Background Removal.
But all of that stuff together means
that it's gonna sell out basically instantly.
Just like I did to our sponsor.
Thanks to ASUS for sponsoring today's video.
ASUS has been providing PC components for almost 30 years
and they've shipped out over half a billion motherboards.
And they couldn't do it without the big support
from the DIY community.
As a show of thanks
they're throwing a big celebration this December 3rd,
and they're gonna show you guys
just how easy it is to build a PC.
Also, there will be giveaways and challenges,
so make sure you don't miss out
by checking out the link below.
Thanks for watching guys.
If you want a little bit more GPU in your life,
maybe go check out our review of the RX 6800 series,
AMD's response to NVIDIA's Ampere.
It really is better than I expected.