Asus TUF GeForce RTX 3060 Ti review

Nvidia’s $400 GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a winner—we called it a “flawlessly constructed” 1440p GPU in our comprehensive review. But the cooling system around it matters. We also noted that while Nvidia’s radical new “flow-through” Founders Edition cooler tamed the GPU effectively enough, it isn’t nearly as potent in this smaller iteration as it is with the massive GeForce RTX 3090. Customized graphics card variants have plenty of room to improve on things, we said.

Today, the $460 Asus TUF RTX 3060 Ti OC proves us right. Asus earned widespread praise for the cooling system on the TUF versions of high-end graphics cards like the GeForce RTX 3080, and it’s just as formidable here. The Asus TUF RTX 3060 Ti runs frigidly and silently even under the heaviest loads, though it also comes with a pricing markup absent from more expensive models.

Spoiler alert: It’s worth it.

Asus TUF RTX 3060 Ti specs, features, and design

Under the hood, the Asus TUF uses the same core technical configuration as all GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards, with 4,864 CUDA cores, 38 dedicated second-gen ray tracing cores, and 80 ROPs. The setup is powerful enough to topple last generation’s RTX 2080 Super—a ferocious graphics card that cost twice as much. Nvidia paired the GPU itself with 8GB of GDDR6 memory over a 256-bit bus, for a total memory bandwidth of 448GB/s.

Here’s a rundown of how the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti’s reference specifications compare against last-gen’s RTX 2060 Super and the step-up $500 RTX 3070:

Nvidia

Asus juiced clock speeds a bit on the TUF OC, pushing it to a 1,755MHz Boost clock and a 1,410MHz base clock. As you’ll see in our gaming benchmarks, however, the added frequency doesn’t really translate to any performance difference. The big draw here is the custom cooler.