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Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition Design
In case you missed it, Nvidia is making an RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition with 8GB, but there won't be a 4060 Ti 16GB Founders Edition, nor will there be a vanilla RTX 4060 Founders Edition. It's a curious departure from the previous two generations, where there were FE models for the RTX 2060 and up, and then the RTX 3060 Ti and up. Maybe EVGA's closing up shop (for the GPU division) helped encourage Nvidia not to compete with its AIB partners on every model. Whatever the case, we have the RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition for this review.
If you check out the RTX 4070 Founders Edition photos, you'll notice that there are only a couple of difference. First, the shroud surrounding the cooler on the RTX 4070 is more of a gunmetal gray, while the RTX 4060 Ti is more silver. Second, the (wholly unnecessary) 16-pin adapter for the 4060 Ti only has a single 8-pin connector on the other end. Yes, Nvidia is hellbent on having every Founders Edition card use a 16-pin connector, just like the 30-series FE cards all used a 12-pin connector. Even if that connector means that, once you get the card ready for installation, it's going to look like this:
That five-inch adapter cable doesn't just look dumb, it also gets in the way if you want to install the card in just about any reasonably sized PC case. And the cable is relatively stiff, meaning if your side panel only gives you one or two inches of clearance, that's going to be a tight bend that will put quite a bit of strain on the cable. What could possibly go wrong? Certainly not melting adapters!
Hopefully that won't occur, and the fact that the whole card only has a 160W TGP means that even with a less secure connection, you'll probably be okay. Still, it's an extra piece of kit in the package that serves no useful purpose that we can come up with. Yes, if you have an ATX 3.0 PSU, you could use a direct connection and run software on you PC to monitor the four sense pins. Is that actually useful, particularly on a relatively low power device? We'd argue that no, it is not.
The RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition comes in the same large clamshell box as the other 40-series Founders Editions. Again, that's extra cost that could have gone to something far more beneficial... like a 192-bit memory interface and 12GB VRAM. It could even have been used to add RGB lighting instead. But we digress.
The full dimensions of the RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition are 244x111x40 mm, which again is the same as the RTX 4070 FE. However, the actual PCB (Printed Circuit Board) under the cooler is different, since it's designed for AD106 rather than AD104. That combined with two fewer memory chips means the weight ought to end up being a bit lower, but perhaps there's extra glue or something else to make up the difference. The 4060 Ti weighs 1026g, compared to the 4070's 1021g.
Other than the change in shroud color, you get the same design language as the other 40-series Founders Editions. There are dual fans, measuring 91mm in diameter. One is near the "rear" of the card and sucks air through the radiator, and the other is at the "front" (by the video ports) and pushes air into the radiator and out the IO shield. One benefit of such a design is that it helps to minimize fan noise — you can't have both fans in direct proximity to a noise meter. How much that helps in a typical case is a bit more nebulous, of course.
It's a pretty compact design, and a good fit for mini-ITX cases. Well, except for the protruding 16-pin adapter cable that's likely to get in the way.
The Founders Edition cards look good overall, particularly if you're not a fan of RGB bling. For a lower TGP card like the RTX 4060 Ti, cooling isn't going to be a problem at all, and the design is probably even overkill. That just means less noise, though, which is nice. Note also that the 18Gbps GDDR6 memory probably runs cooler than the GDDR6X used on higher end 40-series cards.
Video outputs consist of the usual triple DisplayPort 1.4a and single HDMI 2.1 outputs. DisplayPort 1.4a has a maximum data bandwidth of 25.92 Gbps, compared to HDMI 2.1's 42 Gbps (after subtracting encoding overhead). With uncompressed signals, that means a maximum of 4K and 98Hz for the DP connection and 8-bit RGB. With DSC (Display Stream Compression), however, you can drive a 4K 240Hz display like the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 we use for testing.
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