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Nvidia launched the RTX 3060 Ti at the beginning of the month, with both AMD's RX 6900 XT and Cyberpunk 2077 launching in the intermediary period. That means we've had to wait for our first look at a custom RTX 3060 Ti, but the wait is over with this review of Palit's RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC.
Palit has increased the power target with the GamingPro OC, from 200W per the reference spec, up to 240W for this factory overclocked model. That allows the GPU to run consistently faster than the Founders Edition, by almost 100MHz based on our testing.
That may not be a huge amount, but it resulted in performance gains of up to 5% in the games we benchmarked. Averaged across our test suite however, at 1440p the GamingPro OC is 3% faster than the Founders Edition, so we're not really talking much of a difference there, particularly when taking the 27% increase to power draw into account.
As for Palit's cooler, this didn't prove to be much of an improvement on the Founders Edition, if at all. It's hard to make a true apples-to-apples comparison as the GamingPro OC draws significantly more power, but thermal performance was identical between the two, though the GamingPro OC did run a couple of decibels louder out of the box.
Once we noise-normalised to 40dBa, the Founders Edition ran 4C cooler, but again that's with a lower power output. In a nutshell, the GamingPro OC is clearly a capable design, keeping temperatures low with very reasonable noise levels. It's not a clear improvement over the Founders Edition though, but the cards are very much trading blows.
Overclocking the GPU also proved to be relatively successful, as we were able to add 110MHz to the GPU core and 1100MHz to the GDDR6 memory, resulting in a 6% boost to frame rates in the titles we re-tested at 1440p.
All in all, the Palit RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC is a decent card. I wouldn't say it was clearly superior to the Founders Edition, but it's not inferior either – they just have slightly different priorities in terms of power and noise levels. Ordinarily, our main criticism would be the MSRP of £449 here in the UK, as that's £80 more than the baseline MSRP, while it's also just £20 below RTX 3070's MSRP of £469.
The problem there is, of course, there's simply no stock, so prices everywhere are through the roof. Just the other day I saw 10+ RTX 3070s appear online, priced at £650 each, and within an hour they were all sold out. In that world, paying £450 for a decent RTX 3060 Ti like this doesn't seem nearly so bad.
Of course, all being well, there will actually be a good supply of GPUs sooner rather than later, and if 3060 Tis do start appearing for £369, it would be very tough to recommend spending another £80 for the Palit GamingPro OC. Until that happens though, these cards will sell out anyway, irrespective of the high MSRP.
At the time of writing, the GamingPro OC is not even available for pre-order, but it is listed on Overclockers UK HERE.
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Pros
- Sub-70C operating temperatures.
- Up to 5% faster than the Founders Edition, 3% faster on average.
- Overclocked reasonably well.
- Colour-neutral design.
Cons
- Less efficient than Founders Edition.
- Plastic backplate.
- £449 MSRP would be very steep (if 3060 Tis were available for £369).
KitGuru says: Palit has produced a decent card with the GamingPro OC. It hasn't blown our socks off, but if you can get your hands on one, it will do a solid job.
