ASUS RTX 3060 Ti TUF Gaming Graphics Card Review

How Much Does It Cost?

The ASUS RTX 3060 Ti TUF Gaming Graphics Card is set to cost £449.99, which is the same as the MSI Trio X’s price. However, it’s a bit more than the Gigabyte OC card, which is set to launch at £409.99. Please keep in mind that this review goes live a day before the retail release of the cards. You can check for to date stock on Amazon here.

Overview

It became clear quite quickly that ASUS has built a pretty robust card here. Obviously, their latest TUF cooler design is pretty fantastic and allowed this card to run hard throughout all of our testing. Obviously, it can passively cool the card, and the fans sat at zero RPM until the card got fairly warm. Great for keeping things quiet while you’re working. However, even under load, the card was just 38.8 dBa, making it one of the quietest cards we’ve tested. It was basically the same noise levels as the RTX 3080 TUF too. This card also turned out to be the most efficient, using around 332 watts, compared to 371 of the Gigabyte and 345 of the MSI card.

Lower power usage and a premium cool resulted in one more obvious result too, as the card was insanely cool. IT peaked at just 57c, a full 10c lower than the MSI card, and 4c lower than the Gigabyte. It also had the lowest idle. We saw similarly low temperatures on the other recent TUF gaming reviews. Very impressive stuff indeed!

Astonished would be an understatement regarding performance. In a blind test, I’d have trouble telling you which screen was running the RTX 2080 Ti and which was running the RTX 3060 Ti. Of course, the 3060 Ti is slower in the more extreme resolutions, but not by that much. The fact the performance is closer to our 2080 Ti is nuts, given we tested a top of the line AORUS model. In other tests, it matches and beats the RTX 2080 SUPER too. 100 FPS playing Wolfenstein on the 2080 SUPER, and 104 FPS from this card.

1080p, no problem, 1440p, a breeze, 4K… I a little out of puff at high settings, but certainly still playable. Perhaps the RTX 3070 TUF would be the best baseline for 4K if you want to keep the quality settings up. Either way, the bar has been raised here.

Check out my review of the MSI RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio Graphics Card here, and the Gigabyte RTX 3060 Ti Gaming OC Graphics Card review here.

Should I Buy One?

The RTX 3060 Ti series is clearly going to be a big hit with gamers. It’s the most affordable chipset in the new range so far, and the ASUS RTX 3060 Ti TUF Gaming edition is clearly one of the strongest we’ll see. It runs significantly cooler and quieter than its rivals, while still delivery extremely competitive performance and pricing.