Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC PRO review - Final words and conclusion

Final words

I've mentioned this in a couple of other reviews as well; ultimately, everything and anything it's all about gaming price, performance, and, of course, rendering quality. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a product that meets all these factors suitably; while we do feel the RTX 3070 offers oomph for money, the RTX 3060 Ti simply more reachable for a bigger crowd with a more normalized wallet. This card can still run games at 4K but not with raytracing for sure; it will serve you well at WQHD and Full HD. The easy comparative product would be RTX 2080 SUPER and often even close to that RTX 2080 Ti. And that's not a bad spot to be game performance-wise.   

Cooling & noise levels

The  FLIR images show that this card is hardly lighting up, whether that is the silent or performance BIOS modus operandus. Temps under stress load sits just under 66 degrees C at silent mode, 60C with the performance mode BIOS, and that's fine. Acoustics wise this card is a gem; 35 DBa was measured in silent mode, which is silent. Considering that the performance mode does not really bring in more perf other than better cooling, we'd advise switching towards the silent mode BIOS.

Energy

As you have been able to see, we're switching our energy measurements based on PCAT. It's far more precise. This card peaks at 250 Watt (power always fluctuates as much as your frame times and FPS). Averaged out, the card sits at 225 Watt under gaming load, in idle 16~17 watts. We're fine with all values.

Coil whine

The Gigabyte Gaming Pro exhibited only minor amounts of coil whine. So minor that it was hard to detect.

Pricing

NVIDIA is pricing the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti at USD 399. We have not yet received the MSRP for the Gaming PRO OC, but knowing Gigabyte, this product will sit on top of that price only moderately, as this is the more value series seen over the Aorus lineup; we expect something close to 450 USD. But with a predicted low availability, it's hard to really make a solid statement here of prices inflate due to e-tailers hiking up prices.

Tweaking

The graphics card has a solid factory tweak but can be pushed further manually. You'll reach 16 to 16.5 Gbps on the memory, a +100, and for the lucky ones, +150 on the boost frequency (remember that's on top of that factory tweak). Important, slide op that power limiter. More power budget allows the GPU to do what it likes to do the best, go fast. Combined with the tweaks mention on the OC page, you'll sit in the realm of 2000~2100 Mhz on the boost frequency. Remember that values differ per workload and thus the game title. Also, for our tweak to be called valid, it needs to pass four games in a full benchmark run at Ultra HD to be called stable. This specific card result was impressive, 16.3 Gbps on that memory, a turbo in the 2050~2100 Mhz domain. Coming from FE, we're roughly 8% faster after manual tweaking. Commendable is the increased power limiter available to you.

Conclusion

Writing this conclusion makes me realize, this is the 5th RTX 3060 Ti that I am testing, and we still have two more to go. The Gigabyte Gaming OC PRO model is a bit of a classic, really. It's nothing special in aesthetics that we haven't seen from this design for years now. But that'd design does work. Windfoce 3C has proven to remain successful, and here today, with re dual BIOS mode offering, we sit at 35 DBa and a card temp below 70 degrees C. That's fine in my book. The card positions itself roughly 2~3% above founder edition performance, but it tweaks quite well thanks to more leech on the power limiter. Once done, we achieved 8% additional performance over the FE edition, and that is nice. Realistically though, all AIB cards that are a tiny bit more premium all sit roughly in the same performance bracket, which goes as well for tweaking. So that's relative. We can only hope that prices won't be much higher than the founder editions, as that would be a tough sell, with the NVIDIA Founder edition being so good already. This is a product that I like as it offers proper performance at WQHD levels for us common folk. Not just that, you'll have the added benefit of playing some games with hybrid raytracing, as well as the fact that NVIDIA has Tensor cores onboard, offering more perf at complex workloads with DLSS. All-in-all, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti series brings you towards RTX 2080 SUPER performance levels. The 8GB I am fine with as well; I mean, it's the sweet spot in the new mid-range, albeit I find it hard to call it that, as it is the high-end performance with added benefits like DLSS and Hybrid Raytracing support. Overall we have little to nag, really; it's a solid card with accompanying performance. We do feel that it is time for an aesthetics overhaul of the cooler, though. But yeah, definitely recommended and approved.

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- Hilbert, LOAD"*",8,1.