2 weeks Ago By Vaidyanathan Subramaniam
The RTX 5060 Ti comes across as an excellent choice for gamers focused on 1080p, and it also handles 1440p gaming well at high settings, either natively or using DLSS, even with all graphics options and ray tracing maxed out. There is no Founders Edition for the RTX 5060 Ti, but the MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16G Ventus 2X Plus is priced at Nvidia's suggested $429 MSRP. For this price, you get a no-frills GPU that performs as expected in synthetic tests and gaming.
The power efficiency gains are welcome, and the RTX 5060 Ti Ventus 2X Plus's lower heat emissions come with the tradeoff of loud fans in a compact design. All this makes sense only if you can get the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB at MSRP, which is very unlikely going by current store prices. The RTX 5060 Ti is also a better bet than opting for the RTX 4060 Ti or even the RTX 4070 12 GB (if your retailer still stocks one), but a slight budget stretch along with a bit of luck can get you the RTX 5070 for a reasonable price.
Despite having only 12 GB of VRAM, the RTX 5070 outperforms the RTX 5060 Ti in every aspect. The MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Ventus 2X Plus can be had from online retailers near to the suggested $429 MSRP. In India, the GPU officially priced at ₹47,000 but prices at retailers currently seem to be on the higher side.
Nvidia's Blackwell architecture has the potential to find itself among the majority gaming crowd with the introduction of the RTX 5060 Ti based on the GB206 GPU. GB206 offers a 6% higher CUDA core count than the RTX 4060 Ti and comes with all 4,608 of them enabled. You also get 36 RT cores and a welcome 16 GB VRAM on a 128-bit GDDR7 interface.
This is also the first of the Blackwell cards where the PCIe Gen 5 speeds are limited to x8 instead of x16, but this shouldn't have any impact on the card's performance itself. In this review, we take a look at the MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16G Ventus 2X Plus, which is among the many Nvidia add-in board (AiB) partner offerings that is supposed to retail at the suggested $429 MSRP. There's an 8 GB version of the RTX 5060 Ti as well, but Nvidia isn't sampling them to reviewers for obvious reasons.
The MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16G Ventus 2X Plus is built similar to the RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X OC that we had reviewed previously. The RTX 5060 Ti, however, is a single-slot card that measures 22.5 x 10.
5 x 4 cm and weighs about 590 g. Being a Ventus card, the aesthetics are as simple as they can get. There's no RGB of any kind or a VBIOS toggle, and box contains no accessories save for a quick start guide.
The plastic front shroud is accompanied by a metal backplate at the rear. MSI does not allow increasing the power limits of the card, so the max TGP is capped at 180 W. We used the following to evaluate the RTX 5060 Ti 16G: Cooler Master MasterFrame 700 open test bench Intel Core i9-14900K with Intel Extreme profile set in the BIOS Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Master motherboard Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus Gen4 2 TB NVMe SSD and 2x Crucial MX500 1 TB SATA SSDs for OS, benchmarks, and games 2x 16 GB Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5-6400 RAM with timings 32-39-39-80 at 1.
40 V Aorus FO32U2P 4K 240 Hz QD-OLED monitor Thermaltake TH420 V2 Ultra EX ARGB AiO cooler Cooler Master MVE Gold V2 1250 ATX 3.0 fully modular PSU Windows 11 24H2 with the latest patches, together with Nvidia Game Ready Driver version 575.94 issued to the press was used.
We would like to thank Cooler Master for supplying the test bench and PSU, Gigabyte for the motherboard and QD-OLED monitor, Sabrent for the SSD, Thermaltake for the AiO cooler, Kingston for the DDR5 memory kit, and finally Nvidia for the RTX 5060 Ti. The RTX 5060 Ti Ventus 2X Plus offers a good 26% performance gain over the Inno3D RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB Twin X2 in cumulative synthetic tests while trailing the Aorus RTX 4070 Ti Master by a similar margin. The RTX 5070 Founders Edition is 42% faster than the RTX 5060 Ti in overall synthetic benchmarks.
Nvidia isn't pitching the RTX 5060 Ti as an ML accelerator, but it is notable that the latest Blackwell GPU yields a massive 42% improvement over the RTX 4060 Ti in MLPerf. Additionally, the RTX 5060 Ti manages to swing ahead of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the RX 7900 XT in V-Ray benchmarks, where AMD cards typically face challenges. The RTX 5060 Ti Ventus 2X Plus also exceeds expectations in LuxMark tests, even outperforming the AMD RDNA 3 flagships in LuxMark Room.
In pure raster gaming, the RTX 5060 Ti surges ahead of the RTX 4060 Ti, primarily due to increased CUDA core and higher VRAM. Although the RTX 5060 Ti's 448 GB/s memory bandwidth falls short of the 504 GB/s throughput seen in the RTX 4070 Super or even the RTX 4070, it remains useful for demanding tasks like ray tracing. While ray tracing at 1080p yields playable frame rates in titles such as Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty , utilizing upscaling and frame generation technologies becomes invariably necessary in most cases.
In Alan Wake 2 at 4K Ultra ray tracing settings, the RTX 5060 Ti offers a substantial 69% increase in fps with MFG 4x compared to 4K High ray tracing with only 2x frame generation. MFG 4x also helps the card in attaining 60 fps in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and Star Wars Outlaws at 4K Ultra with all ray tracing settings cranked up to the max. Although not many games natively support MFG, the Nvidia app allows DLSS Overrides, enabling users to manually utilize DLSS 4 and MFG in numerous supported titles.
During a FurMark stress at 1,280x720 with no AA, the RTX 5060 Ti Ventus 2X Plus boosts up to 2,595 MHz momentarily before settling at an average of 2,490 MHz. The GPU power consumption remains more or less steady at 180 W during the run. When playing Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p Ultra, the RTX 5060 Ti tends to maintain a fairly stable boost clock of 2,708 MHz while using only 162 W, with average core temperatures hovering around 71°C.
The RTX 5060 Ti Ventus 2X Plus's dual Stormforce fans help in effective cooling without any perceivable throttling as seen in the Cyberpunk 2077 runs at 1080p Ultra and 4K Ultra graphs below. At an ambient temperature of 23 °C, the RTX 5060 Ti Ventus 2X Plus's metal backplate warms up to 51 °C while the front shroud remains relatively cool around the 25 °C mark. Similar to the RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X OC, the RTX 5060 Ti Ventus 2X Plus is also a relatively loud GPU, with fan noise levels reaching nearly 50 dB(A).
The fans stop completely in idle, however. Given its modest power requirements, the RTX 5060 Ti is quite frugal in terms of power consumption. The GPU shows decent power efficiency gains over the AMD RDNA 3 flagships in Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 at 1080p Ultra.
The MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16G Ventus 2X Plus delivers noticeably better performance compared to the RTX 4060 Ti and can be a viable 1080p or 1440p Ultra gaming solution (with some help from DLSS) if you can snag one at $429 MSRP..
