Introduction

ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4060 OC is easily the most over-the-top premium custom design graphics card based on the otherwise mid-range new GPU by NVIDIA. The card is designed with the signature triple-slot ROG Strix cooling that ASUS debuted with the RTX 40-series. When installed, the card will look like something at least two segments above the RTX 4060—there are RTX 4070 Ti cards that look more modest. The Strix OC 4060 may have the most elaborate cooling solution in this segment, and ASUS has done its best to give it the highest possible factory-overclock, and the quietest fan-tuning, taking advantage of the large cooling solution.

The new GeForce RTX 4060 is designed to fill in a very important market segment for NVIDIA, the $300 entrant, which has historically been held by the industry’s most popular graphics cards each generation—the likes of the RTX 3060, RTX 2060, and GTX 1060. Even as of late 2022, the Steam Hardware Survey suggests that over two-thirds of PC gamers play at 1080p Full HD resolution, which is what the RTX 4060 is designed for—to play any of today’s games at max settings. It’s possible to even turn on ray tracing, and any performance issues can be overcome with DLSS.

The GeForce RTX 4060 has a couple of aces up its sleeve that are supposed to make it a better choice than older generation graphics cards floating around in the market at competitive prices. Firstly, as an RTX 40-series GPU, it supports DLSS 3, a revolutionary new feature that nearly doubles performance by generating entire alternate frames completely using AI, and without involving the graphics rendering machinery. Secondly, being built on not just the latest 5 nm EUV foundry node, but also the smallest silicon from NVIDIA for this generation, the AD107, means that the RTX 4060 enjoys some of the lowest power draw numbers, with its typical gaming power rated at no more than 115 W at reference speeds.

The RTX 4060 maxes out the AD107 silicon that it’s based on, enabling all 24 SM (streaming multiprocessors) physically present, which amounts to 3,072 CUDA cores, 96 Tensor cores, 24 RT cores, and 96 TMUs. The AD107 gets 48 ROPs, and a memory interface similar to that of the AD106 powering the RTX 4060 Ti, with a 128-bit GDDR6 memory interface running 8 GB of 17 Gbps memory. This yields 272 GB/s of memory bandwidth, compared to the 288 GB/s that the RTX 4060 Ti enjoys with its 18 Gbps memory.

Compared to its predecessor, the original RTX 3060, the new RTX 4060 sees both its memory size and memory bus width reduced by 50%. NVIDIA says this is nothing to be alarmed about as the new Ada Lovelace architecture sees a major re-design of the GPU’s memory sub-system, with an 8 times larger on-die last-level cache of 24 MB, compared to the 3 MB cache of the GA106 powering the RTX 3060. NVIDIA says that the larger on-die cache reduce video memory round-trips by 40% to 60% in its testing, which means the GPU can make do with narrower memory interfaces.

The ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4060 features the company’s very latest ROG Strix cooling, with an elaborate aluminium fin-stack heatsink that’s ventilated by a trio of Axial-Tech fans. The metal cooler shroud and backplate passively dissipate heat on their own, and ASUS refers to this as the Vented Exoskeleton. The card weighs nearly double that of many of the MSRP-priced custom-design RTX 4060 cards we’ve tested previously. Besides its large profile, the card features plenty of RGB LED lighting, and some premium features, such as dual-BIOS, case-fan and addressable RGB headers. The performance “P-BIOS” of the card offers the highest factory overclock for the RTX 4060, with a boost frequency of 2670 MHz (+210 MHz over reference), while leaving the memory untouched at 17 Gbps. ASUS is pricing the card at a wild $390, at which it risks stepping on the toes of MSRP-priced RTX 4060 Ti cards.

Short 10-Minute Video Comparing 10x RTX 4060

Our goal with the videos is to create short summaries, not go into all the details and test results, which can be found in our written reviews.