Nvidia’s add-in-board partner Palit is now selling its RTX 4060 GPUs with a shorter PCI Express (PCIe) interface. The three cards in the series listed on the official website come with either a single or dual fan configurations, both of which feature the shorter PCIe connector. The change was first spotted by a Twitter user and while this may impact (though unlikely) the amount of GPU sag or structural support to the card, there will be no difference in performance.
Nvidiaannounced the RTX 4060 and the RTX 4060Tiin May this year and the non-Ti variant recently went on sale. The Founders Edition (FE) is priced at $299 with board partner cards from Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, Zotac, and others priced a bit higher. Just like the FE card, the RTX 4060 models from partners come with a full-size 16X PCIe interface, even though the GPU does not use all 16 lanes of the PCI Express bus and is limited to only 8 lanes. One of the board partners, however, has taken a different approach to their RTX 4060 GPUs.
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Palit is an Nvidia board partner that has been making GPUs for many generations. With its RTX 4060 lineup, the company has decided to ship its cards with a shorter PCIe interface. Thenew design was first spottedby a @fpsojisan_yt on Twitter. The official Palit website currently lists three models, the RTX 4060 Dual, Dual OC, and StormX. In terms of specifications, the three are fairly identical with the Dual OC variant having a slightly higher boost clock of 2670MHz compared to the other two with 2460MHz. They are all 2-slot cards, but the StromX has a single fan design. And they all come with an 8X PCIe interface.
Because that’s all the lanes the GPU really needs, there is no loss in performance with the new design. However, a longer PCIe connector does somewhat help with structural support and GPU sag, so it is unclear how well the new design will stand the test of time. Of course, a third-party solution like an anti-sag bracket can be applied to help with sag. Furthermore, the issue of structural support would be more of a headache if these GPUs had three fans or were 3-slot thick.
As for other board partners, it doesn’t seem like they will be switching to a shorter PCIe interface for their RTX 4060 cards as it doesn’t affect performance and might require changes to the manufacturing process. The board partner cards from Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and others have the standard 16X PCIe interface but 8 of them are dummy lanes.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 boasts of 3072 cuda cores, 8GB GDDR6 VRAM, with support for 4K at 240Hz or 8K at 60Hz with DSC. It supports the latest 3rd generation Ray Tracing cores and 4th generation Tensor cores. While it is nowhere as powerful or power-hungry as its bigger brothers, theRTX 4080 and 4090, it is still capable ofplaying modern AAA titlesat high settings but at 1080p resolution. At $299, it competes with the Radeon RX 7600 which offers similar or slightly better performance for $270, but without support for DLSS 3 performance enhancements.
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