A Closer Look
The Gigabyte RTX 4060 Gaming OC looks great, but I’ve always been a fan of the Windforce cooler design, it’s a sensible mixture of boring professional aesthetics and a bit of gamer cool, and lands somewhere in the middle. They could go over the top, but if you want an outlandish cooler then simply check out their Aorus series. They may not change this design much for each new card, but hey, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
With three fans over a surprisingly large heatsink, at least, relative to the size of the PCB, cooling of the chipset should be pretty easy. Plus, the card uses the Windforce system where the outer fans spin clockwise and the middle fan counterclockwise, creating a powerful air vortex that helps pull more heat away from the heatsink.
The card is only two slots thick, but it is quite long, with the heatsink being twice the length of the PCB. If you look closely you can see the actual PCB stops near the middle, just where the power connector is.
This card doesn’t need a lot of juice, so it can make do with the old 8-pin PSU header, which is awesome, as I’m just not a fan of that new connector anyway.
The backplate looks pretty special on this card, with a sort of gunmetal finish that looks pretty slick. It actually made me think of an aircraft carrier though, perhaps that’s just me. There’s a lot of metal here though, so the PCB is well-protected and cooled.
Furthermore, there’s a huge hole at the back where you can see a thick dense heatsink and two robust heatpipes, allowing for heat to be exhausted right out the back of the card.
The rear I/O features two HDMI and two DisplayPort, while some other 4060s use one HDMI and three DisplayPort, so depending on your display configurations, this is certainly something you should pay attention to.
The card comes apart quite easily, with the backplate screwing into the heatsink securely, and ensuring the card stays much more rigid.
The heatsink is more densely packed than expected, with a good amount of fins throughout, and the heatsink itself is made up of three sections, joined together by two direct contact heatpipes.
In terms of the PCB, it’s what we’ve come to expect from a Gaming OC card, and the power delivery is made up of a 4+1 power phase setup. The GPU utilises the Alpha and Omega 36306 MOSFET’s which are rated for 28A of current and sit under the uPI uP9512U controller, while the memory uses a single Alpha and Omega 36344 MOSFET along with a 7212 Buck controller. Around the core are the 4 SK Hynix 2GB memory ICs, with plenty of room for more chips if NVIDIA decides that 8GB of VRAM is enough.
