Palit RTX 3060 StormX OC Review

1. Introduction2. Palit RTX 3060 StormX OC3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing6. Assassin's Creed Valhalla7. Control8. Cyberpunk 20779. Dirt 510. The Division 211. F1 202012. Gears 513. Hitman 314. Metro Exodus15. Red Dead Redemption 216. Total War Saga: Troy17. Watch Dogs: Legion18. Performance Summary (12 Game Average)19. Clock Speed20. Temperatures21. Acoustics22. Noise-Normalised Temperatures23. Power Consumption24. Overclocking25. Closing Thoughts26. View All Pages

Since the launch of Nvidia's Ampere architecture last year, we have seen a number of GPUs hit the market with very high TDPs, perfectly illustrated by RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 which both consume over 300W of power. This meant board partners had to design some seriously large coolers to deal with such high-power silicon. With the RTX 3060, however, we are starting to see a shift in thinking. With its 170W TDP, Palit has been able to design a single-fan card that is barely longer than a x16 PCIe slot.

To start with an interesting fact, since the launch of the RTX 30-series last September, I've not reviewed a single graphics card from one of Nvidia's board partners that wasn't a triple-fan card. There's nothing inherently wrong with such cards, but more fans of course means more space required, so the coolers from the likes of ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte have all been pretty large.

Not so for the Palit RTX 3060 StormX OC. This card measures just 170mm long, utilising a single 100mm fan, while its heatsink design is also fairly basic. Is this card good enough to handle the 170W GA106 GPU? That's what we will find out today.

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 new 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 Palit StormX OC model however, has increased this to 1807MHz, and we test real-world clock speed behaviour later in this review.

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. Despite being factory overclocked, the StormX OC also shares this TGP rating.

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