Introduction

Galax GeForce RTX 4060 EX is the company’s most affordable custom-design rendition of the new RTX 4060 mid-range graphics card by NVIDIA. Galax has made every effort to make sure its MSRP graphics card doesn’t look undercut in design, and besides a large cooling solution with a twin 102 mm fan design, the company includes a few nice touches, such as RGB lighting for the fans. You also get a neat little factory overclock. The new GeForce RTX 4060 being launched today is designed to be a successor to a long line of hit graphics cards by NVIDIA, including the RTX 3060, RTX 2060, and GTX 1060, which have been topping Steam Hardware Survey charts for years. These cards are meant for 1080p gaming with fairly high settings.

The new GeForce RTX 4060 is based on the latest Ada Lovelace graphics architecture, and is very much a new-generation graphics card. Besides a generational performance increase over the RTX 3060, it offers two unique features—firstly, you get DLSS 3 Frame Generation, a path-breaking new feature that nearly doubles frame-rates without compromising on visuals. DLSS 3 uses AI to generate entire alternate frames without involving the main graphics rendering machinery. The second major uplift is energy efficiency. The RTX 4060 is based on the latest 5 nm foundry node, and NVIDIA rates its typical power draw at just 115 W, or about 50% less than that of its predecessor.

The GeForce RTX 4060 is based on NVIDIA’s smallest silicon for this generation, the AD107, which it maxes out, enabling all 24 streaming multiprocessors (SM) physically present, which work out to 3,072 CUDA cores, 24 RT cores, 96 Tensor cores, 96 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. The card is endowed with 8 GB of 17 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit wide memory bus. Both the memory size and bus width are cut down by 50% compared to the original RTX 3060, but NVIDIA assures us that it reworked the memory sub-system with Ada. Larger on-die caches reduce the video memory round-trips by 40% to 60%, NVIDIA claims, which allowed it to slim down the video memory.

The Galax RTX 4060 EX is designed to tame the 115 W typical power draw of the RTX 4060 with a fairly elaborate aluminium fin-stack cooler that uses a pair of large fans. Much of the airflow from the second fan flows through the heatsink, and out large cutouts on the backplate. The card offers factory overclocked speeds of 2565 MHz compared to 2460 MHz reference, and an untouched 17 Gbps for the memory. At the NVIDIA baseline price of $300, this card offers a compelling product that looks like it could be one of the premium custom designs priced above the MSRP, especially given the factory overclock.