Introduction

ZOTAC today introduced its GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge graphics card, which leads the company’s lean lineup of custom-design Ampere graphics cards based on this GPU. ZOTAC’s strategy with performance-segment graphics cards has been to create frugal and compact graphics cards it can sell at prices close to the NVIDIA baseline. Frugal doesn’t necessarily mean “cheap” as ZOTAC offers a free extended warranty upon product registration that is longer than most other brands’ warranties. The RTX 3060 Ti Ampere is NVIDIA’s most affordable GPU launched for this generation thus far and targets a much wider audience with its $400 starting price. It is designed to offer 1440p AAA gaming with raytracing. It’s also designed to offer e-sports gaming at 1080p at higher refresh-rates, such as 144 Hz.

Much of the innovation with Ampere has been to make RTX-enabled gaming a lot more playable since real-time raytracing puts a heavy performance impact on your hardware. A by-product of this approach is that non-RTX (traditional raster 3D) performance is significantly higher for this generation, with NVIDIA claiming that the RTX 3060 Ti beats the previous-generation RTX 2080 Super, a $700 graphics card meant for exactly the same use-cases as this card. The GeForce Ampere architecture introduces NVIDIA’s 2nd generation RTX technology that combines traditional raster 3D with raytraced elements, such as lighting, reflections, shadows, and global illumination; and with Ampere, even raytraced motion-blur.

The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is carved out of the same GA104 silicon as the recently launched RTX 3070, but with less of the chip enabled. It features 38 out of 48 Ampere streaming multiprocessors present on the chip, resulting in a CUDA core count of 4,864, more than double the 2,176 CUDA cores found on the RTX 2060 Super, which this GPU is designed to succeed. This also yields 152 Tensor cores, 38 RT cores, 152 TMUs, and 80 ROPs. The RTX 3060 Ti is endowed with the same exact memory configuration as the RX 3070, with 8 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface. This configuration results in 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The 2nd generation RTX technology combines new Ampere CUDA cores with concurrent FP32+INT32 math operations, 2nd generation RT cores with double the intersection performance and hardware for raytraced motion-blur effects; and 3rd generation Tensor cores that leverage DNN sparsity to increase AI inference performance significantly.

The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge is strictly two slots thick and full-height for maximum compatibility. There isn’t any RGB bling, nothing too flashy. This card is targeted at gamers who just want an RTX 3060 Ti for its main use, to install and forget about. Keeping with the theme of maximum compatibility, the ZOTAC Twin Edge is among the few custom-design RTX 3060 Ti that comes with a single 8-pin PCIe power input, which should be more than sufficient for this GPU as its typical board power is rated at 200 W. The Zotac Twin Edge ticks at reference clocks and power limit. In this review, we put the ZOTAC RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge through its paces to tell you whether this is all you need for 1440p RTX gaming.