Its been 2 months now since we’ve seen RTX 30 series releases and the one thing common between these cards is how gigantic they are. Despite the fact that the RTX 30-series cards are remarkably easy to cool (they dip 5*C in a second once load is removed) and I’ve always wondered how a smaller cooler would fare. Then we got the RTX 3070 which had a slim dual-fan cooler with a modified blow-through cooler. Still, partner cards remained gigantic. ZOTAC did release a dual-fan cooler of their own for the RTX 3070, dubbed the Twin Edge. I noted in my review that despite its wider body, the ZOTAC RTX 3070 Twin Edge OC fits well into smaller builds. I’ve head readers sending in their ITX and mATX builds with this card and its quite impressive ZOTAC broke the big-ass cooler trend particularly the triple fan one for the RTX 3060 Ti.
NOTE: If you’re looking for the ZOTAC RTX 3060 Twin Edge review, Google confuses this review for the non-Ti version, you can hit my other review to see how that card performs.
As part of our launch coverage of the NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti, in this review we’ll take a look at the ZOTAC RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge OC. We also have our review of the NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition and the ASUS TUF GAMING RTX 3060 Ti OC.
Following the theme of the Twin Edge lineup from ZOTAC, the RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge OC features a smaller dual-fan cooling solution. The large overhang of the RTX 3070 Twin Edge OC is now gone and the footprint of this card is more reminiscent of older RTX 2060 SUPER or lower cards. This makes highly compatible with a lot of cases.
Other than that, there’s not a lot of bells and whistles on the ZOTAC RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge OC and ZOTAC is keeping it lowkey as well, compressing the card to a tight 2-slot height. The overall length of the card is also short and much of the discussion we’ll have about this card is about its size. Spoiling what we have for the conclusion: this card is performance-to-volume leader for the RTX 3060 Ti we’ve tested and while the Founders Edition may have something to say about that, this card packs a factory OC and lighter cooling solution against the FE.
ZOTAC is also quite conservative on RGB for their Twin Edge lineup. I’d have expected at least another spot where we got RGB but this card only has a light logo for the ZOTAC Gaming brand. The rest of the card is covered with a backplate with slits for design and black cooler at the bottom.
RTX 3060 Ti | RTX 2060 SUPER | RX 5700 XT | RTX 2080 Ti FE | RTX 3080 FE | RTX 3070 FE | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Architecture | Ampere | Turing | RDNA | Turing | Ampere | Ampere |
Stream Processors/ CUDA Cores | 4864 | 2176 | 2560 | 4352 | 8704 | 5888 |
Boost frequency | 1665Mhz | 1650Mhz | 2010 Mhz | 1635Mhz | 1710 MHz | 1725 MHz |
Memory | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 11GB GDDR6 | 10GB GDDR6X | 8GB GDDR6 |
Memory bus | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 352-bit | 320-bit | 256-bit |
As the name implies, the ZOTAC RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge OC packs a factory overclock of up to 1695Mhz. As always, NVIDIA’s GPU Boost will happily takeover and ignore this setting in most gaming scenarios.