PNY RTX 3060 XLR8 Gaming Review

It has been some time since we last looked at a graphics card from PNY, but that changes today. Here we review the RTX 3060 XLR8 Gaming, a dual-fan card that ships with a bling-tastic RGB implementation and, interestingly, no factory overclock. Can this card compete with the likes of the MSI Gaming X Trio and Gigabyte Gaming OC?

American-based manufacturer PNY may be better known for its Quadro series of GPUs, but it does also manufacture GeForce consumer cards – the last of which we reviewed being the RTX 2080 Ti XLR8 in 2019. The RTX 3060 XLR8 Gaming we are looking at today is more modest, with a plastic construction and dual-fan cooler.

Having already reviewed three very capable RTX 3060 cards from Gigabyte, MSI and Palit, PNY certainly has its work cut out with the XLR8 Gaming – but can it impress?

GPU	RTX 3090	RTX 3080	RTX 3070	RTX 3060 Ti	RTX 3060
SMs	82	68	46	38	28
CUDA Cores	10496	8704	5888	4864	3584
Tensor Cores	328	272	184	152	112
RT Cores	82	68	46	38	28
Texture Units	328	272	184	152	112
ROPs	112	96	96	80	48
GPU Boost Clock	1695 MHz	1710 MHz	1725 MHz	1665 MHz	1777 MHz
Memory Data Rate	19.5 Gbps	19 Gbps	14 Gbps	14 Gbps	15 Gbps
Total Video Memory	24GB GDDR6X	10GB GDDR6X	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	12GB GDDR6
Memory Interface	384-bit	320-bit	256-bit	256-bit	192-bit
Memory Bandwidth	936 GB/Sec	760 GB/Sec	448 GB/Sec	448 GB/Sec	360 GB/sec
TGP	350W	320W	220W	200W	170W

Despite utilising GA106 silicon, RTX 3060 isn’t actually a full implementation of the GPU, as it has 28 streaming multiprocessors (SMs) instead of 30. Currently only RTX 3060 for laptops uses the full GPU. For the desktop chip, 28 SMs means a total of 3584 CUDA Cores, as thanks to Ampere’s new SM structure with its two FP32 datapaths, each SM houses 128 CUDA cores.

Ampere also places one RT core, and four Tensor cores, in each SM, giving a total of 28 RT cores and 112 Tensor cores. This is accompanied by 112 texture units, and 48 ROPs which are now housed directly within each graphics processing cluster (GPC), with 16 ROPs per GPC, and 3 GPCs in total for RTX 3060.

Interestingly, rated clock speed is the highest it has been for an Ampere GPU, coming in at 1777MHz for the reference spec. This PNY XLR8 Gaming card is not factory overclocked, retaining the 1777MHz boost clock rating.

There’s been a lot of talk about Nvidia’s decision to use 12GB GDDR6 memory for the RTX 3060. This is more than the RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070 and even RTX 3080, but crucially the memory interface is much narrower at 192-bit. With memory clocked at 15Gbps, total memory bandwidth comes in at 360GB/s, about 20% lower than the RTX 3060 Ti.

Lastly, for total graphics power, Nvidia rates the RTX 3060 for 170W, which is 30W less than the RTX 3060 Ti. The XLR8 Gaming also shares this TGP rating.

The post PNY RTX 3060 XLR8 Gaming Review first appeared on KitGuru.

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