ASUS RTX 3060 Ti TUF Gaming Graphics Card Review
Peter Donnell / 4 years ago
A Closer Look
The TUF series has always looked cool, but their latest design is one of their best yet! I am a fan of STRIX cards, but their design is very loud and almost obnoxious. This TUF series card is much more dark and ominous, no colour to be found anywhere on the face of the card. Does it look familiar to you? That’s because it’s the same cooler seen on the RTX 3080 and 3090 TUF Gaming!
If this cooler can tame the more powerful RTX cards, then it should have no issue with something as “simple” as the RTX 3060 Ti. It uses a huge heatsink, allowing for passive cooling in low-load and temperature scenarios. When you do need some extra airflow, you’ll get it from three axial fans. The middle fan spins the other way from the outer two, creating a vortex throughout the card.
Down the side of the card, you’ll find a single 8-pin header. I should note that the MSI RTX 3060 Ti had two connectors, which seemed excessive to me.
There’s a lot of ventilation around the heatsink, which is obviously a good thing!
Tucked into the side, you’ll find a simple BIOS OC switch, performance is normal, but quiet mode drops the power a little in a bid to make the card quieter and more efficient at the cost of some performance.
The backplate on this card looks awesome, and I even like the tyre marks. It looks like a car ran over the card, but it’s all still in one piece. Now that’s what I call TOUGH… I mean TUF.
Finally, at the rear of the card you get the usual three DP, but ASUS has managed to sneak in a second HDMI too; I’ve never seen this layout of ports before.
