Review on 🎮 ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3060 Twin Edge OC 12GB GDDR6 192-bit 15 Gbps PCIE 4.0 Gaming Graphics Card, IceStorm 2.0 Cooling, Active Fan Control, Freeze Fan Stop by Don Acevedo

Relevant rig specs: Ryzen 5 3600 overclocked to 4.2GHz at 1.25v1800MHz Infinity Fabric 32GB DDR 3600MHz 1080) Gsync Compatible. Alright, let's deal with that. The MSRP on this card is $479.99, and even that's a bit steep. Don't rely on these washouts. I was lucky enough to hit f5 along with the bots. UPGRADE AND INSTALLATION PATH Upgraded from an aging Powercolor 580 8GB with a dead fan to this one. Changing the card brand from AMD to Nvidia required me to run DDU and select "uninstall and shut down" before installing the new card and the latest one Installed prepackaged game drivers from the web Nvdia website right after MSI Afterburner reported that this card overclocks to 1935MHz, with 7500MHz in memory without touching any sliders GA MING PERFORMANCE I'm a gamer, not a miner. If you plan to mine on this map, this review will not help you. I play my games in 1080p with settings as high as possible and RTX off. I haven't tested 1440p yet, but I've never used 5GB of the 12 available. I'm sure it won't make a huge difference in performance, but I'm sure someone has already compared on YouTube. Difference in GPU bound games like Black Ops Cold War (Rx580 8GB, I got about 70 in multiplayer and less in zombies with occasional stuttering and stuttering, settings don't change much except power consumption) causing gsync to run smoothly and in between bounces 144 and 120 fps in zombies, 180 fps indoors and in multiplayer. In CPU intensive games like Hitman 3 the increase is less significant due to fantastic game optimization on Polaris cards (like my old 580 that drew on conservative settings in the 60's and 70's) but with 3060 I was able to beat my 3600 by 35% increase to over 60%, sometimes even to 70% or 75%. The frame rate consistently exceeds 100 and only reaches two-digit values in places with a high NPC density (maximum possible value with most settings, with the exception of "Simulation quality" leave in the base). DRIVER / SOFTWARE. Red-green switches are drivers. I may have been unlucky, but I haven't had good experiences with Radeon drivers and their Adrenaline program. I found nothing in it other than buggy, unnecessary features that made games run worse 3/4 of the time and driver updates that blocked my windows install unless I checked the box but the Nvidia drivers and the package were more reliable. I haven't had any problems, but some people have reported problems with older cards. Maybe that could explain my Radeon issues. In any case, it's still worth noting that my experience has improved. Nvidia software allows you to record the game and stream it easily. Footage of this looks fantastic, almost indistinguishable from what I saw on the monitor during gameplay. Haven't tried streaming yet, would probably just use OBS. FORM FACTOR, NOISE AND COOLING The card has 2 slots and 2 fans. It doesn't use the new Nvidia connector, so a standard 8-pin connector will suffice. The box it comes in has an empty space for the converter. Don't worry you haven't lost anything, I assume it's Zotac savings on packaging. If you don't mess up the fan curve in a program like Afterburner, the fans will only turn on between 55 and 60 to keep the idle fan noise down. Normally they're in the 53-54 range when idle. I'm sure that's probably good for the card, but I made it so the fans run as little as possible instead of shutting down completely, which keeps the temperature up about 40, which is about the same as my idle CPU. You can definitely hear the fans playing. When they build up it's really audible, but it doesn't really bother me. When I'm gaming I set the fans to 80% to quell fan hum and at this level there is no noise through my headset and the card stays at around 60. I was concerned that I might only get 2 fan cards , but I thought it would be a good cooling solution, with enough room to play if you want to overclock. more than 500 even 450 tbh I wish I had waited but I'm satisfied for now. If you play 1080 I wouldn't look for anything faster