 You heard it here first folks, NVIDIA is launching yet another 30 series GPU that nobody's going to be able to find in stock. But it's not all bad because for the handful of gamers who do get their hands on this thing at MSRP it is going to be one heck of a gameful Christmas because spoiler alert the 3060 Ti is hella fast. I'll tell you all about it. But first I'll tell you about our sponsor, Team Group. Team Group's Dark Z Alpha DDR4 memory is compatible with Ryzen 35000 and you can win a computer that uses this RAM at Team Group's Christmas giveaway at the link below. Scalpers aside, I'd be lying if I said I'm not super excited about these cards. At $399, the MSRP, the value they represent is substantial for anyone with a PC who's looking for a console alternative, especially when you consider that, according to NVIDIA anyway, it's faster than an RTX 2080 Super. And you know what? On paper anyway, I think I believe them. It's got more than double the previous gen RTX 2060 Super's CUDA cores and at just a 25 watt increase in rated power consumption. In fact, the core count is only about 20% lower than the RTX 3070 with specs that are otherwise pretty comparable. Same 8 gigs of GDDR6 memory, same bandwidth, and just a few less rubs. You'd expect that to translate into roughly 20% lower overall performance. To put that theory to the test, we've gathered not only the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 2080 Super, but the next steps up for both of these GPUs and Team Red's latest and greatest to see just how far four Benjamins, theoretically, will get you. Good thing we didn't pay for ours because Christmas would have been completely ruined. We've spoken with NVIDIA and our card is almost certainly defective. But we're gonna keep going anyway since the performance numbers look okay, and we can't get another one here in time. We'll just have to skip some of our tests. For traditional gaming, Shadow of the Tomb Raider places the RTX 3060 Ti firmly behind the 3070 and the 2080 Ti. Although worryingly for AMD, its ray traced performance roughly matches their $569 RX 6800 and completely embarrasses it in fully path traced Minecraft RTX, where the differences between the RTX cards are actually slimmer than I would have expected. Wolfenstein Youngblood in traditional rasterizing has our higher-end cards pulling away from the 3060 Ti, although we weren't able to test ray tracing performance here due to that problem with our review sample. Microsoft great equalizer or flight simulator makes short work of the 3060 Ti relegating it to console FPS status unless you're prepared to reduce your resolution or your visual quality. And finally, CSGO has the 3060 Ti nearly beating out the 2080 Ti, albeit with slightly worse frame pacing if the 95th percentile minimums are anything to go by. So it looks pretty great from a gaming standpoint. As for productivity, the RTX 3060 Ti just straight-up drop kicks the last gen. Even the 2080 Ti with performance that is surprisingly close to the 3070, especially with the optics renderer at sub 20 seconds for the BMW test. And the spanking gets even more thorough as we move on to V-Ray and Octane bench with only the RTX off results for the latter dipping below the RTX 2080 Ti. Specview perf finally has the 2080 Super trading blows with the 3060 Ti with 3ds Max and Maya pulling off wins for the new card thanks to the extra CUDA cores and Solidworks seeing better performance out of the previous gen thanks to its higher clock speed. Physically the founders edition looks pretty much exactly like the RTX 3070 just with like a you know a palette swap. Slight color change and that's from the cooler right down to the new 12 pin connector, which I find a little bit frustrating. The biggest reason for which is that both the 3070 and 3060 Ti are now using this special snowflake connector that they have no practical need for whatsoever. I mean, it's not the end of the world. The adapter is still included in the box so it's not like it's gonna affect your ability to plug the card into your power supply. I just don't really know what the point is. Maybe Nvidia hopes that if enough cards have this connector, traditional PCI Express power cables will eventually disappear. So far nobody seems to be taking the bait. Throughout our testing core clocks though were extremely stable pushing past 2 GHz under most circumstances to overtake the RTX 3070's clock speeds and this seems to be thanks in large part to the fewer CUDA cores and of course the reused cooler which is just as potent. Our 3060 Ti founders hit a peak of just 71 degrees throughout our test which implies that there's a lot of thermal headroom that remains to be exploited. Average and maximum fan speeds were also roughly the same between these two cards suggesting that unless there's bad thermal compound the 3060 Ti must be drawing a similar amount of power too. Which it is. Sitting at or below 200 watts most of the time with momentary spikes as high as about 230 watts the 3060 Ti is just a bit lower than the RTX 3070 and surprisingly pretty close to the RTX 2080 Super. I mean Ampere is well known by now for sucking back that juice but it's still surprising to see this kind of power draw in a 60 class card and I'm sure it's gonna cause a headache or two for at least some of you who are trying to upgrade a pre-built PC or who skimped on your power supply way back in the day. Again though, it's not like a crazy amount and it's nothing that a single 8 pin connector couldn't have handled. Now before our conclusion, I want to address the elephant in the room. Using the MSRP to review a product like this when we know that it's unlikely to be available at that price probably seems pretty disingenuous to some of you and I can see why people get mad about it. But the truth is there is no conspiracy where Nvidia is paying the press to misrepresent the pricing or whatever. We just don't really have a better way to deal with this. When we review a product we can only work with the information that we have at the time. I don't know how much crazy people are gonna pay to scalpers on eBay and I don't know how long these shortages are gonna last. But the thing is this video is gonna be up forever. Long after these cards drop back down to earth-like prices. So my best bet then is to just review it from inside the bubble of how the world is supposed to work and then offer the caveat that you might need to wait in order to get the value that we're talking about here. So with that in mind then, the conclusion. Despite the power consumption the 3060 Ti at $399 is gonna occupy a very popular spot on shelves for both mid-range gamers and budget conscious professionals alike. It's a great looking product. It's fast. It's affordable. It's got a ton of killer features thanks to its RT cores and tensor cores which unlock Nvidia's gamer oriented AI goodness like RTX voice and automatic background removal, but all of that stuff together means that it's going to sell out basically instantly. Just like I did to our sponsor. Thanks to Asus for sponsoring today's video. Asus has been providing PC components for almost 30 years and they've shipped out over half a billion motherboards and they couldn't do it without the big support from the DIY community. As a show of thanks, they're throwing a big celebration this December 3rd and they're gonna show you guys just how easy it is to build a PC. Also, there will be giveaways and challenges. So make sure you don't miss out by checking out the link below. Thanks for watching guys. If you want a little bit more GPU in your life, maybe go check out our review of the RX 6800 series AMD's response to Nvidia's Ampere. It really is better than I expected.