Be sure to read about the other benefits of the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition. Likewise, you’ll also be able to enjoy ray tracing and AI enhanced features like Nvidia Broadcast. No matter which card you buy, you’ll have access to core features of this generation like DLSS, which intelligently upscales content to play games at higher resolutions with lower performance cost.
Under the hood, the Strix is packing all of the same specs as every other RTX 3060 Ti: 4864 CUDA Cores, 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, as well as the latest generation of Nvidia’s Ampere architecture. As a result, it was able to eek out slightly higher FPS in many scenarios than other RTX 3060 Tis I tested. Thanks to those low temps, the card was easily able to surpass this and instead hovered around 2GHz. The card comes with a high factory overclock of 1890 MHz in OC Mode, which is a solid +220MHz boost over the reference model. Running so cool also means thermal throttling is never an issue. Toggling it to Quiet allowed the card to rise to 63C under load but dropped to 31dB, beating the Founders Edition. The card features a dual BIOS switch to choose between Performance and Quiet modes. Both cards were easily drowned out by my case fans. Using a decibel meter, it came in at 35dB, which was only 2dB louder than the FE.
The card features a zero RPM mode, which stops the fans when the card isn’t being pressed, but even under full load I was hard pressed to hear any difference in noise with my naked ear. A similarly specced MSI RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio, reached 68C under the same conditions.
In my testing, it peaked at 59 degrees celsius in my Lian Li LanCool II chassis. This design, combined with Asus’s Axial-tech fan design, allows the card to stay nice and cool while also keeping temperatures down. The last fan blows directly through the heatsink and exhausts through a vent in the backplate of the card. I was happy to see that the Strix follows Nvidia’s lead and uses a shortened PCB.
It’s a heavy, industrial looking card that doesn’t need RGB to look cool (though it has that too). It uses a metal frame to prevent sag and even more on the backplate to shed heat. The card is built sturdily that metal trim isn’t just for show. In fact, it’s tenths of an inch bigger than the BFGPU itself, the RTX 3090, though Asus classified this card as 2.9-slot width instead of the 3090’s 3-slot. It features a striking, and great looking, triple-fan cooler that absolutely dwarfs the Founders Edition version of the card. Asus ROG Strix RTX 3060 Ti OC – Design and FeaturesThe ROG Strix RTX 3060 Ti is a beast of a card.