Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated, but with some unplanned time away I do have a lot to catch up on with the biggest being checking out the Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti. Nvidia sent over the RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan GPU from PNY. The RTX 5060 Ti is available in both 8GB and 16GB variants and this is the 16GB model. I’m curious to see how it will compare to the RTX 5070, the previous xx60 Ti models as well as everything that AMD has to offer. I’m also curious what PNY has going on with their card design. So let’s dive in and see what it’s all about.
Product Name: Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 16GB
Review Sample Provided by: Nvidia/PNY
Written by: Wes Compton
Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE
Before getting into testing I did also run GPUz to double-check that our clock speeds matched up with the specifications. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan is an overclocked GPU with a 2692 MHz boost clock speed which matches up with the specifications. The stock 5060 Ti boost clock is 2407 MHz so that is a hefty overclock all things considering. Beyond that testing was done with the launch driver provided by Nvidia.
Packaging
The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan comes in a surprisingly compact box and it has a white background. The front of the box has a picture of the card across it which I wish every box had. It's not a big deal when shopping online, but when shopping in a store it's nice to be able to see what you are getting and this does a great job of that. The Nvidia required wrap-around takes up a lot of the front but does put the RTX 5060 Ti model information front and center and along the bottom edge shows a few of their features. The PNY branding is simple and to the point up in the top left corner and doesn’t take up too much space. Beyond that, the front does let us know that this is an overclocked card and it is the 16GB variant, and that it has a stealth mode for the fans. Around on the back, the white background continues as does the Nvidia wrap around with that filling up most of the bottom half. There is a picture of the back of the card here. Beyond that, they touch on the card having a metal backplate and PNYs VelocityX software and that’s all you will find.
When you open the box up the card comes wrapped in a static protective bag and has a big sticker on it with the part number and serial number on it as well as all of the normal certification logos. There aren’t any accessories included. The card uses a standard PCIe power connection so there isn’t an adapter cable needing to be included here. So all you get is one bundle of papers that has a quick install guide and all of the technical support and contact information on it.
Card Layout and Photos
The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan is a simple dual-fan card design with a black plastic fan shroud. They have blended both a glossy finish and a textured finish to give the card some styling with gloss sections in all four corners. There is also an infinity loop like shape that wraps around the two fans with a glossy finish as well. The card is 9.65 inches long which is relatively short for cards these days, but even still there is a big gap between the two fans. It is 4.72 inches tall which puts it slightly above the “standard” PCI height which you can see with the shroud sitting 15 mm above the top of the PCI bracket. It is a true dual-slot card leaving a little buffer even for airflow which is rare to see in any overclocked aftermarket card anymore but great for any compact or SFF builds.
The fan side of the PNY RTX 5060 Ti gives us a closer look at that infinity loop design that wraps around both of the fans on the fan shroud. We can also see that both of the fans are the same size and have the PNY branding on their center caps. Both fans sit in a 90 mm opening with a slightly teardrop shape but the fans themselves are a little smaller, closer to 85 mm. They have 9 blades and the fans don’t have any of the normal features we have been seeing the last few generations like an outer ring that helps direct the flow down and gives the fan blades more strength. There are also no ripples or any other tricks. In fact, the blades aren’t that aggressive with large gaps between each blade. They blow down into the aluminum heatsink below and with the right fan, it partially blows through and out the back of the card as well.
Up on the top edge of the card, a few things are going on of note. PNY has printed some branding along this edge in a bright white on the top edge of the fan shroud. They have the PNY logo and then the full GeForce RTX 5060 Ti model name as well. We used to see this on all cards, especially from EVGA but everyone has stopped putting the GPU model up here and I don’t know why. Especially with higher-end cards, I would much rather show off the GPU I am running than random branding. None of this is lit up with lighting, everything here is simple in black and white, literally. Also up on top, you have the power connection and that is where we see some changes from the last few Nvidia cards that have been in the office. For starters, the PNY RTX 5060 Ti uses a PCIe 8-pin power connection, not a 12VHPWR but the most interesting part is the connection is all the way on the PCI bracket end of the card. With so many cards having blow-through designs and shorter PCBs a lot of the power connections have been in the middle of the top of the card. I do miss them being down at the end but this is an interesting take and I’m a little torn on it. On one note, because it's at the end, it could be a little cleaner on wiring. But because a lot of cases plan for the plug to be at the middle or the end of the case you are more likely to have to have it run across awkwardly to reach this spot. It’s also packing more heat right above the GPU itself which is already hot.
Working our way around the top, bottom, and end of the PNY RTX 5060 Ti we get a better idea of how they are handling cooling. For starters, all three edges do have open areas beyond the edge of the fan shroud that wraps around. The heatsink is an aluminum fin design in a vertical orientation with air blowing down into the cooler and is directed up and down to out of the top and bottom edge except for the blow-through area on the end of the card. They have four heatpipes running the length of the card and looking back around on the left side to double up to help pull the heat from the GPU and memory area out to the secondary heatsink behind the right fan. You can see this especially well with the bottom view, there is a big gap between the two heatsinks where the heatpipes adjust up from being in direct contact up to the middle of the heatsink. The right fan's heatsink fits to the top and bottom of the card but isn’t the full thickness, leaving room for even more cooling there. The left heatsink at the top is recessed back to fit around the power connection. That power connection doesn’t have the clip flipped towards the PCB so they needed more space to account for that as well.
For display connections, the PNY RTX 5060 Ti has the “standard” layout with three DisplayPort and one HDMI port. The HDMI is down towards the bottom and is labeled to make it easy to find.
On the packaging, one of the main features PNY showed off was the card's metal backplate and while it is mostly standard these days it is an important part of the card to prevent sag. In this case, the backplate is a thick aluminum with a flat black finish on it. They have the RTX 5060 Ti model name across it in a bright white along with the PNY logo. I like it when cards have the model name featured, especially over having even more branding. Also printed on the backplate are all of the certification logos in a light grey and tucked in along the bottom edge near the end. Above that the backplate does have three openings cut into to allow the second fan to blow through partially. This design does still block a lot of the airflow but the card can still vent out the top and bottom in that area too so a completely open area isn’t needed.
Test Rig and Procedures
Test System
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D – Live Pricing
Motherboard: ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero – Live Pricing
Cooling: Enermax LIQMAXFLO 360mm Liquid CPU Cooler - Live Pricing
Noctua NT-H2 Thermal Paste - Live Pricing
Memory: G.SKILL Trident Z5 Neo RGB Series (2x16GB) 6000MT/s CL28-36-36-96 – Live Pricing
Storage: Viper VP4300 Lite 4TB – Live Pricing
Power Supply: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1600W- Live Pricing
Case: Primochill Wetbench - Live Pricing
OS: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit - Live Pricing
Synthetic Benchmarks
As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. In this case, I want to see how it compares to the previous generations of xx60 Ti GPUs, The RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT from AMD, and the RTX 4070 FE.
The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan scored a 41427 in the base Fire Strike which put it in below the RTX 3080 and ahead of the RTX 4070. It was below the RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT and a 24% improvement from the previous generation RTX 4060 Ti. In Fire Strike Extreme it scored a 21102 which put it right with the RX 7700 XT and the RTX 4070 while still below the RTX 3080. It came in 31% over the 4060 Ti. Then for Fire Strike Ultra, it scored a 9318 which was just over the RTX 3070 Ti but behind the RTX 4070 as well as the RX 7700 XT putting it 27% over the 4060 Ti.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. For base Time Spy the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan scored a 16343 which was behind the 77000 XT and the 4070 and ahead of the 3070 Ti. In Time Spy the improvement over the RTX 4060 Ti shrank down to 20%. That same percentage was seen in Time Spy Extreme as well with it scoring a 7547 and sitting below the RX 7700 XT once again.
I did also test using the new 3DMark Speed Way which is one of their latest benchmarks and Port Royal as well. Speed Way is DX12 as well but combines more future-focused tech like Ray Tracing which up until its release where only used in feature tests, not full benchmarks. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan scored a 4178 in the Speed Way benchmark sitting behind the RX 7900 GRE and ahead of the RX 7800 XT. It is still behind the RTX 4070 but improved on the performance of the RTX 4060 Ti by 29%. In Port Royal, it scored a 10549 and is sitting behind the RTX 4070 once again but ahead of the RX 7800 XT. It’s a 28% improvement over the RTX 4060 Ti.
The last test is the newer 3Dmark Steel Nomad benchmark. Officially this is the replacement for the Time Spy benchmark. It is a DX12 benchmark and doesn’t include ray tracing but is updated to better take advantage of modern cards. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan scored a 3657 and sits 23% over the previous RTX 4060 Ti. It sits below the R 6800 XT this time around as well as the RTX 4070 and is ahead of the RTX 3070 Ti.
I did also slip in our 3DMark DLSS comparison as well. For this test, I run all of the available DLSS tests on 3DMark at 4K. This gives us a peak at the performance improvements between each generation of DLSS in an ideal situation. For the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan, it started at just 22.4 FPS with DLSS turned off. DLSS 1 improved on that up to 41.2 FPS. DLSS 2 improved on that again up to 56.93 FPS. Then DLSS 3 was 81.04. The biggest jump was with Multi Frame generation with DLSS 4 where it averaged 141.75 FPS. The improvements from generation to generation are impressive, but the most impressive part is when we look at the base no-DLSS result compared to with DLSS 4 it’s a staggering 532% improvement. Like I said before, this is as perfect of a situation as you can get. DLSS already knows exactly what each frame is going to be in a synthetic benchmark like this, but even still it’s a crazy improvement.
In-Game Benchmarks
Now we finally get into the in game performance and that is the main reason people pick up a new video card. To test things out I ran through our new benchmark suite that tests 8 games at three different resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4k). Most of the games tested have been run at the highest detail setting and a mid-range detail setting to get a look at how turning things up hurts performance and to give an idea of whether turning detail down from max will be beneficial for frame rates. Cyberpunk 2077 is also tested with Super Sampling (DLSS/FSR/XeSS). In total, each video card is tested 60 times and that makes for a huge mess of results when you put them all together. To help with that I like to start with these overall playability graphs that take all of the results and give an easier-to-read result. I have one for each of the three resolutions and each is broken up into four FPS ranges. Under 30 FPS is considered unplayable, over 30 is playable but not ideal, over 60 is the sweet spot, over 120 FPS is for high refresh rate monitors, and 240 helps show the performance ideal for the latest higher refresh displays.
So how did the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan do? At 1080p all of the results were at or over 60 FPS with just two results in that 60-119 FPS range. At 1440p everything was over 60 FPS as well, but at that resolution 7 results were in that 60-119 FPS range but a majority were still in the 120 FPS and more with 3 over 240 FPS and 8 below that but over 120 FPS. At 4K the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan runs into a wall. 11 of the 18 results were still over 60 FPS, but this is the first resolution that we see results under 60 FPS with 7 results in that range. 9 are between 60 and 119 FPS and 3 were over 120 FPS.
To get a better look at some of the cards that are the closest competition to the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan I have averaged out the results for a range of cards at each of the resolutions tested. Where the graphs above give a very general look at performance, this gives us a more detailed look at performance. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan is just a hair under 200 for its 1080p results which puts it above the RTX 4070 FE which was 6 FPS behind it. At 1440p the gap between the 5060 Ti and the 4070 was tighter with just 2 FPS between them. Then at 4k, the gap gets a little wider again with 5 FPS keeping the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan ahead. The new card up was the RX 7800 XT but it wasn’t close at any of the resolutions and the RX 9070 was in its own category compared to the RTX 5060 Ti.
Just to touch on it, I did also take the results and removed our two Cyberpunk tests that test using DLSS. With the 5060 Ti using DLSS 4 and the 4070 only supporting DLSS 3 there is a big performance difference there. Without those results at all we get a different picture. The 5060 Ti comes in below the RTX 4070 and the RX 7700 XT and the improvement from the RTX 4060 Ti to the RTX 5060 Ti is 16% where it was 28% before.
Of course, I have all of the actual in game results as well for anyone who wants to sort through the wall of graphs below. The averages above already paint the picture for the most part though. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan does sit ahead of the RX 7700 XT in 8 of the 14 tests but they do trade blows.
Another new addition to my testing was a few additional tests using Cyberpunk 2077. This is one of only a few games that support most of the tech from all three of the GPU companies. So I did tests at medium and ultra detail while having Super Sampling on for all of the cards. Using whatever the latest and greatest is supported. In this case, I tested with DLSS 4. Just a note here, the AMD cards only allowed FSR when running windowed mode whereas Nvidia only performed well in fullscreen mode which does affect the numbers somewhat. For the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan, you can see in both the medium and ultra detail tests that without DLSS it is in the bottom half of the chart and moves up in the chart with DLSS 4. Without DLSS it is just below the RTX 4070 and ahead of the 7700 XT with medium detail and at ultra detail it is behind the 6800 XT and ahead of the 7700 XT once again. At least at 1080p and 1440p, that story changes significantly at 4k. With DLSS 4 the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan is sitting below the RTX 4090 FE at ultra detail, showing how much DLSS 4 helps over DLSS 3 which the 4090 supports. At 1440 and ultra detail the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan goes from 81 FPS up to 267, a 230% increase. More importantly, it makes the high frame rates needed for a high refresh display possible.
Compute and AI Benchmarks
Now some people don’t need a video card for gaming, they need the processing power for rendering or 2D/3D production, or in some cases, people who game also do work on the side. AI performance importance has increased quickly recently as well. So it is also important to check out the compute and AI performance on all of the video cards that come in. That includes doing a few different tests. My first test was Geekbench AI, a cross-platform AI benchmark that uses real world machine learning tasks giving three results, a full precision score, half precision score, and quantized score. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan is sitting in the middle of the pack here just ahead of the RTX 4070 Ti and below the RTX 4070 SUPER.
Blender is always my favorite compute benchmark because the open-source 3D rendering software is very popular and it isn’t a synthetic benchmark. With the latest version of Blender, they redid the benchmark so we now have a new test that runs three different renderings and gives each a score. I have all three stacked together so we can see the overall performance. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan is again right smake dab in the middle of the chart. This time sitting ahead of the RX 7900 XTX and below the RTX 3080 FE. On these, however, it isn’t that far ahead of the older RTX 4060 Ti 16GB with that sitting just two below it.
For CUDA-based cards, I also check out V-Ray Benchmark 5 to check out CUDA and RTX performance in the 3D rendering and simulation software. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan is in the bottom half of the chart here sitting below the RTX 3080 and ahead of the RTX 3070 Ti FE. The 4060 Ti is just two below it though there is still a good gap between their scores.
Cooling Noise and Power
For my last few tests, rather than focusing on in game performance, I like to check out other aspects of video card performance. These are also the most important ways to differentiate the performance between cards that have the same GPU. To start things off I took a look at power usage.
For this, our test setup utilizes the Nvidia-designed PCat v2 along with cables to handle both traditional 6 or 8-pin connections as well as 12VHPWR. The PCat also utilizes a PCIe adapter to measure any power going to the card through the PCIe slot so we can measure the video card wattage exclusively, not the entire system as we have done in the past. I test with a mix of applications to get both in game, synthetic benchmarks, and other workloads like GeekbenchAI and OCCT. Then everything is averaged together for our result. I also have the individual results for this specific card and I document the peak wattage result. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan averaged 211 watts across our tests which put it just above the RX 7600 and below the RTX 4070 FE, not bad considering it is an overclocked card, and typically those aren’t as efficient. The OCCT workload was the highest wattage pulled with Cyberpunk 4k just behind that.
With having exact peak wattage numbers when running Time Spy Extreme I was also able to put together a graph showing the total score for each watt that a card draws which gives us an interesting look at overall power efficiency in the popular and demanding benchmark. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan came in with 35.66 points per watt which was up in the top half of our chart below the RTX 4070 SUPER and above the RTX 4080. For comparison, the 5070 FE was up at 37.79 points per watt. I know I mentioned it previously but I do have to wonder how different a stock-clocked card would be in this situation.
My next round of tests were looking at noise levels. These are especially important to me because I can’t stand to listen to my PC whirling. Especially when I’m not in game and other applications are using the GPU. For my testing, though I first tested with the fan cranked up to 100% to get an idea of how loud it can get, then again at 50% to get an idea of its range. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan did really well at 50% fan speed coming in at 37.1 decibels. It went up in the chart for the 100% fan speed result however putting it closer to the middle of the pack. But when we see the fan RPM chart we do see that it is sitting lower on the noise chart than the RPM chart which means they did a good job given the total fan speed.
I also take a look at noise performance while under load. For that when running AIDA64’s stress test I wait until the temperature of the card has leveled off and then measure how loud things are when the card is at its worst-case scenario with the stock fan profile. Here the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan is back in the bottom 1/3 of the chart which is great to see. This is the most important noise result and it came in at 35.6 dB, right above the Prime 5070.
To finish up my testing I of course had to check out the cooling performance. To do this I ran two different tests. I used AIDA64’s Stress Test run for a half-hour each to warm things up (on everything except the 5090 which was tested on a similarly matched OCCT workload). Then I documented what temperature the GPU leveled out at with the stock fan profile and then again with the fans cranked up to 100%. With the stock profile, the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan leveled off in temperature at 70c which is in the top half of our chart and is sitting ahead of the RTX 4070 SUPER and below the RTX 3070 FE. It did that with the fan speed sitting at 44% which means that there is room for the fan profile to be tuned a little but that would be at the cost of under-load noise performance which the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan did well with. Then with the fans cranked up, the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan crept up a little farther in the chart but did drop down from 70c to 58c. That is a delta of 12c which does show what I already mentioned, there is room for a little adjustment in the stock fan profile. But the 100% fan speed results aren’t too big of a surprise given that this is a relatively compact 2-fan and dual-slot card. As for memory temperatures, the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan was middle of the pack with the stock fan profile but did well when the fans were cranked up.
While running the stock fan profile testing I also took the time to get a few thermal images so we could see what is going on. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti was coolest behind the right fan on the fan side of the card with the left fan being 6c warmer down at the bottom but the hotspot did show a small spot up in the top of that fan near the power connection. The top view showed the same thing with the area near the power connection running up to 64.5c and it gets cooler as you go from that end to the other end of the card. The same on the back side as well with the hottest spot on the back being even hotter at 71c. It was 51c near the middle of the card and 47c down on the end at the blow-through area.
Overall and Final Verdict
Finally getting a look at the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan as well as the RTX 5060 Ti as a whole has been interesting. PNY’s card design is very simple and to the point, but I don’t know that I would consider that to be a bad thing. Their design keeps things a little smaller and compact compared to a lot of the other aftermarket cards you come across. It doesn’t use huge oversized fans or a triple fan design. With that, it is small enough that I wouldn’t be worried about it fitting just about any build. They didn’t go crazy with the styling, it has a simple black plastic fan shroud with just a touch of styling. I like that they include the GPU model on the branding on the card as well, you don’t see that enough anymore. With that simple design, there isn’t any RGB lighting or anything else to drive the cost up. The card design does come with a full-length metal backplate with a blow-through cooling design. The only quirk on the card design is the location of the power connection, which btw is a PCIe power plug, it is tucked up at the PCI bracket end of the card. That location seemed to put a little extra heat up in that already hot area in our temperature testing. For overall temps, the card did run a little warmer, but that was because of a nonaggressive fan profile which could be adjusted slightly. With that fan profile, the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan was extremely quiet when doing noise testing under load so there is that tradeoff for the temps.
As far as performance goes there are two different mindsets to consider. When it came to 1080p and 1440p it had no trouble in any of our tests. The only issues come up when we start comparing it to previous models. Specifically the RTX 4060 Ti and the RTX 4070. When we include benchmarks that take advantage of super sampling the RTX 5060 Ti does extremely well with it having DLSS 4. But when we take those results out the RX 7700 and RTX 4070 both jump ahead of it in performance and the gap between it and the previous xx60 Ti the RTX 4060 Ti shrinks as well. With that in mind the RTX 5060 Ti and with it the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan depends a lot on how the pricing lands and it depends on if the games you are planning on playing will be able to take advantage of DLSS 4.
Above I put together a graph comparing Time Spy Extreme benchmark scores and both MSRP and current card pricing. Time Spy Extreme doesn’t take advantage of Super Sampling and doesn’t include any ray tracing. But it does give a level playing field outside of that. The RTX 5060 Ti has an MSRP of $429 with the 16GB VRAM that this card has. If we only had to worry about MSRPs the 5060 Ti would come in just below the RX 7700 XT and ahead of the RTX 4060 in price to performance. But because of the world we live in these days, going off of the cheapest price for each card on PCPartPicker the cheapest RTX 5060 Ti 16GB would be $480 dropping its score to price from 17.59 down to 15.72 but interestingly pushing it up higher in the value chart. The RX 7700 XT is still a better value, but the RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4070 that are often compared with it are way down in the chart as their market prices are through the roof. Of course, all of this is most likely about to be shaken up with AMD’s 9060 XT hitting the market on the 5th.
Live Pricing: HERE
