To No One's Surprise, the RTX 4060 is an Unimpressive Overclocker

GeForce RTX 4060
(Image credit: Twitter - @NVIDIAGeForce)

Reviews for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 are still under embargo, but the company has lifted a partial embargo that allows certain content creators to release limited performance reviews of the budget GPU. The partial embargo is limited to 1080p testing of Cyberpunk 2077, and Youtuber JayzTwoCents seems to have found that the Asus RTX 4060 Dual is terrible at overclocking in Cyberpunk 2077.

The model only gained 2% higher frame rates after overclocking, with a modest 100MHz core offset and a hefty 20% power increase over stock. The card still performs well over its predecessor at stock settings, but don't plan on getting an extra boost with overclocking — at least, not in Cyberpunk 2077.

Nvidia clearly picked Cyberpunk 2077 for this partial embargo lift to show off the RTX 4060's performance chops against its competitors (and predecessors). Cyberpunk 2077 is currently one of the most popular AAA titles for GPU benchmarking, and it shows off all of Nvidia's latest technology, including DLSS resolution upscaling, DLSS 3 frame generation, ray-tracing effects, and path-tracing effects.

To be fair, in JayzTwoCents' preview, the RTX 4060's overclocking ability was its worst aspect. Despite having a huge amount of power headroom to play with, the RTX 4060 went from averaging 81 fps (frames per second) on the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark to averaging... 82.5 fps.

The RTX 4060 is very efficient, but it wasn't able to take advantage of any additional power limits it might have access to (perhaps due to voltage limits). And again, this is a very restricted look at performance and overclocking, plus there are other caveats.

JayzTwoCents did not push the card to its limit, and he did not overclock the GPU memory at all. As a result, the card almost certainly has more to offer than what's being shown here. But if a 100MHz core offset and a power limit increase only improved performance by 2%, it's reasonable to assume that memory overclocking along with slightly higher core offsets will still yield underwhelming results.

This is typical of modern graphics cards. Boost clocks are usually a conservative estimate of the lower end of the clock scale that you'll see with a GPU. Most of Nvidia's RTX 40-series GPUs exceed the listed boost clock by 150–200 MHz, and while GPU clock offsets can increase the final result, other limits like power and voltage come into play. Plus, leaving the memory at stock probably loses at least 3% of the final maximum overclock.

Overclocking aside, the RTX 4060 appeared to perform well in JayzTwoCents' limited testing. The RTX 4060 was much faster than the RTX 3060 in Cyberpunk 2077, featuring a 27% gap at 1080p resolution. If the RTX 4060 can maintain this performance improvement across other titles, it could be a good upgrade path for RTX 2060 owners at its starting price of just $299. Nvidia is also pitching this as an upgrade for GTX 1060 owners who have been holding out for a long time, in which case they'll see much larger gains plus the additional RTX features like ray tracing and DLSS. But we'll have more thoughts when our full review goes live later this week. 

Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

  • Giroro
    Imma go ahead and block every "reviewer" who Nvidia allowed this pre-pre-release semi-embargo lift.
    Because anybody involved is not just the very definition of shilling for access, but they shilled so hard that Nvidia deemed them worthy of double-extra exclusive mega access for being the biggest shills of all.

    Nvidia should be ashamed, but so should the YouTube pitch men who built their entire fake-review business around sucking up to Nvidia.
    Reply
  • The card still performs well over its predecessor at stock settings, but don't plan on getting an extra boost with overclocking — at least, not in Cyberpunk 2077. The RTX 4060 is very efficient, but it wasn't able to take advantage of any additional power limits it might have access to (perhaps due to voltage limits).

    First of all, the CP2077 benchmark is inconsistent, and like you mentioned, we can't really draw any rational conclusion based on a single game.

    NOT fully sure, but OC didn't help here much 'cause partly due to the card's limited memory bandwidth, and also because the GPU's capability was already at it's full limits, due to setting the Image Quality setting to Ultra, and with some RT enabled.

    That's why the benefits from overclocking/OC are very low in this game. So gains from a faster memory OC could also not make much sense here, given the tiny bus and relatively low memory bandwidth of the card. But I still expect small gains from a Mem OC.
    Reply
  • Elusive Ruse
    Cyberpunk is Nvidia's benchmarking app at this point, I put zero stocks in it.
    Reply

  • To No One's Surprise, the RTX 4060 is an Unimpressive Overclocker

    The article's title is misleading though. How is it an "unimpressive overclocker" ? Just based on ONE game, and that too a benchmark, we can't draw any concrete conclusion that the 4060 fails to overclock better.

    Also, the MEM OC was untouched, which might make some difference in other games. But Nvidia did give some TDP headroom to tweak, so maybe gains might be observed in other titles. A more fitting and appropriate title would be:

    "The RTX 4060 offers marginal gains from OC in Cyberpunk 2077"
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    Giroro said:
    but they shilled so hard that Nvidia deemed them worthy of double-extra exclusive mega access for being the biggest shills of all.
    jay at least didn't shill.

    he even stated the price was not good.

    and thats ALL that matters about a gpu.

    every single modern GPU is "good" at a hardware lvl.

    the only thing that makes it good or bad to the consumer is the price.


    is a 4080 bad because its less $ to performance than a 4090? No.

    is a 4070 bad because its bad $ to performance of a 4080? No.

    it ALL comes down to the price. Not the the hardware itself.

    Yes, the 128bit bus on 4060/ti was a stupid mistake on nvidias part but it isnt always gonna be an issue (depends on what you are doing with it)
    Reply
  • hotaru251 said:

    he even stated the price was not good.

    and thats ALL that matters about a gpu.

    Nothing could be further from the truth.

    If a graphics card is not good enough for the games you wanna play, the fact that you bought it cheaply, will do little to console you.

    A bad purchase is a bad purchase, regardless of how much you paid for it.

    hotaru251 said:

    it ALL comes down to the price. Not the the hardware itself.

    If that's the case, then it's just too bad. Hardware quality, should be consumers' top priority.
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    Metal Messiah. said:
    First of all, the CP2077 benchmark is inconsistent, and like you mentioned, we can't really draw any rational conclusion based on a single game.
    That's not my experience at all, at least if you're not running at settings that exceed your VRAM (e.g. 4K RT-Ultra on an 8GB GPU). Variance between runs for my Cyberpunk 2077 tests is usually something like 0.1%, with the 1% lows as usual showing slightly more of a difference between runs.

    But while the headline is a bit debatable, we did note several times that this is a single game result and not particularly significant. (I didn't write it, and news was a bit slow today, so take it for what it's worth.) Definitely pisses me off that Nvidia gave several YouTubers an option to do a preview of performance two days early, though.
    Reply
  • PEnns
    "the RTX 4060 is an Unimpressive Overclocker"
    And yet, whenever "certain" techie websites compare GPUs, they ALWAYS give NVidia extra points because their cards are allegedly way over-clockable than AMD's....!

    And I am sure this dubious drivel will continue.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    I don't trust any reviews of anything on Youtube. If it reaches 81 FPS, presumably at 1920x1080 no ray tracing no DLSS, the same performance as the 2080S and 3060Ti, then it should be able to put in mid 60s with them. It would take a massive overclock to bring it to the next performance tier of 75fps average, which would mean overclocking is effectively useless. The same applies for 2560x1440 no ray tracing no DLSS to get to 60fps.

    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU said:
    Definitely pisses me off that Nvidia gave several YouTubers an option to do a preview of performance two days early, though.

    Lemme guess... Jayz was one of them. :ROFLMAO:
    Reply