Introduction
We called the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti “bandwidth constrained” in our NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition Video Card Review. Therefore, we want to see how much overclocking will affect performance. In today’s overclocking review, we take the new GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and overclock it as far as we can to see what the performance uplift is from overclocking. If you have been wondering how to overclock the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, this guide should help you.
The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB video card was introduced on May 23rd, 2023, and brings the Ada Lovelace architecture in the GeForce RTX 40 series down to the $399 price point. The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti introduces new features such as AV1 encoding and DLSS 3 Frame Generation. The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is geared for the 1080p gameplay experience. In our launch review, we took a look at the Founders Edition of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB video card.
In that review, we compared performance at 1080p as well as 1440p with the Radeon RX 6650 XT, and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti to see the generational performance upgrade. We found that the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti offered a big upgrade over the Radeon RX 6650 XT in performance, but only a minimal performance uplift versus the last generation GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. We also found that as the resolution increased, the performance differences narrowed on the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti. Therefore, in today’s overclocking review, we are very interested to see what the ultimate performance advantage will be versus the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti when the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is overclocked.
As a quick run-down, the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti utilizes 3 Graphics Processing Clusters, 17 Texture Processing Clusters, and 34 Streaming Multiprocessors. What this means is that the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti has 4,352 CUDA Cores, 136 Texture Units, 48 ROPs, 136 (4th Gen) Tensor Cores, and 34 (3rd Gen) RT Cores. It will have a Base Clock of 2310MHz and a Boost Clock of 2535MHz. Memory consists of 8GB of GDDR6 at 18GHz on a 128-bit memory bus. This provides 288GB/s of actual memory bandwidth. It has 32MB of L2 cache. The TGP is 160W for this video card.
How to Overclock the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition
To overclock the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition we grabbed the latest version of MSI Afterburner, which is the go-to overclocking tool for GPUs. The software allowed us to control fan speed, power target, GPU, and memory clock. We could not adjust the voltage, but this was not necessary and would have eaten into the TGP.
On the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition, we were able to increase the Power Limit by 9% from 100% to 109%. This is a little bit lower than we’ve experienced on some previous GPUs. For example, the GeForce RTX 4070 was able to increase its power limit by 10% and the GeForce RTX 4080 is able to increase its power limit by 11% and the GeForce RTX 4090 was able to increase its power limit by 33%. Therefore, the RTX 4060 Ti FE is on the lowest side of the power limit increase potential we’ve encountered so far.
We had plenty of overclocking headroom on the overclocking sliders for the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti FE. Our final overclock ended up at +170 on the Core Clock slider and +1220MHz on the Memory Clock slider. We were able to get it slightly higher on the Core Clock slider, for a shorter period of time. This did allow it to hit 3GHz maximum GPU clock speed, but, it was not sustained for long. We ultimately even pushed it slightly beyond 3GHz, but it was not stable. 3GHz may be an attainable value for custom add-in-board cards, especially if it has voltage control or beefed-up power delivery and power limits.
The memory is also overclocked very well, at default it operates at 18GHz. Our overclock at +1220 set the memory to 2555MHz which equates to 20.44GHz. We actually did manage to push the memory as high as 21GHz, but we actually started seeing artifacts after a little while. Backing it down to just south of 20.5GHz, right at 20.4GHz worked out very well and gave us a nice bump to bandwidth. The bandwidth increased from 288GB/s to now 327GB/s with the new overclock at 20.4GHz. That is a very decent bump in memory clock speed overclock from 18GHz to 20.4GHz.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition has a boost clock of 2535MHz. By default, we can see that it maintains a pretty solid 2805MHz while gaming, with a few dips here and there. That means the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is already boosting about 11% above the boost clock, just by default, without even overclocking.
When we add our overclock of +170 on top of that, our video card hit a stable solid frequency of 2985MHz while gaming. We did hit 3GHz briefly at the start, but that wasn’t sustained. At 2985MHz we are getting a 6% clock speed boost over the default GPU boost clock of 2805MHz. That doesn’t sound like a whole lot, unless you consider that at 2985MHz the GPU is operating a total of 18% over the GPU boost clock of 2535MHz. But since the default performance is what we were already getting in-game, then the smaller 6% overclock is the performance gain we will actually benefit from over default, which is about 180MHz. The larger difference may come from the memory bandwidth boost, but we will see what the gaming performance says.
The system setup for benchmarks is exactly the same as our launch review.