Final words and conclusion
Final words
The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE edition sits at the 399 USD marker, and I can only hope that ASUS will not be pricing this one with a 100 USD premium 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.
Performance
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
ASUS does it well. You've seen the FLIR images; it's not even lighting up. The performance BIOS gets this card to 58 Degrees C, the Silent BIOS mode to 61 Degrees C. Temps will vary a bit based on chassis and airflow. Acoustics wise there is only one setting to consider, silent BIOS mode, as it is just that silent. The perf mode makes little sense tbh.
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 243 Watt (power always fluctuates as much as your frame times and FPS). Averaged out, the card sits at 224 Watt under gaming load, in idle 16 watts. We're fine with all values.
Coil whine
The STRIX GeForce RTX 3060 Ti exhibits coil squeal, albeit very little, and it's hard to hear. In a closed chassis, that noise would fade away in the background. Graphics cards all make this in some form, especially at high framerates; this can be perceived.
Pricing
NVIDIA is pricing the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti at USD 399. We have not yet received the MSRP for the STRIX OC, but knowing ASUS will add a 100 USD premium. That's steep, but with a predicted low availability, they'll sell like candy none the less.
Tweaking
The graphics card has a mild factory tweak but can be pushed a little further. You'll reach 15.5~16 Gbps on the memory, perhaps a +100 to +150 on the boost frequency. 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 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. The end result for this STRIX card was pretty impressive, 16.5 Gbps on that memory, a turbo in the 2100~2150 Mhz domain, and a very wide 135% on the power limiter certainly opens up performance. Coming from FE we're roughly 10% faster after manual tweaking.
Conclusion
She's a beauty, alright. Albeit the factory tweaked products these days bring in what, sometimes 2-3 FPS extra on average, you do have to admit that it is impressive to see that AIB partners can compete really well with the really excellent founder edition cards. ASUS went pretty extreme on cooling this round; a near three-slot thick cooler is the result. Performance-wise we cannot complain; it is RTX 2080 SUPER and even 2080 Ti territory that these cards are tackling. An ongoing trend with all new technologies, of course, is an increase in graphics memory, or better yet, growing demand and thirst for it. Up-to 2560x1440, really, you're good to go with 8GB for now. In Ultra HD, you'll quickly run out of VRAM in the future and thus stamina as frames bounce back and forth due to the lack of it. Overall this is a solid performing product that will please the masses. You'll get excellent framerates in the aforementioned resolutions with bitter-sweet eye-candy at the best quality setting. It's also a graphics card that allows you to fool around and twiddle a bit with Hybrid raytracing. On DX-R, we stopped testing games that are marked with Raytracing that only do RT shadows. It's a waste of performance as the rasterizer engine is simple by far good enough. Games with raytraced reflections, that's what you should be after, and that's what we''ll call a properly raytraced game. For this card, DXR in Full HD is a good option, and you can get a nice buddy assist when the game also supports DLSS v2.0.
The product looks nice, comes with dual-BIOS, and if you purchase the OC model, that slight bump in extra performance. The performance BIOS mode makes little sense anymore; flick that b... on silent and get the same performance with a GPU under 65 Degrees C at load, in total and sheer serene silence. The card tweaked really terrific also. We love the 135% on the power limiter btw. So yeah, amen, brother, a top pick. However, I filtered out the pricing in regards to that award choice for now. We still have to wait and see how that pans out.
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