Conclusion
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 is NVIDIA’s answer to the more budget-minded gamer, mainly 1080p gameplay-focused, and sits under the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti with a reference MSRP of $299. In today’s review, we put the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G Video Card through its paces, which has excellent cooling using the WINDFORCE cooling system from GIGABYTE, and surprisingly good performance, when not VRAM limited.
GIGABYTE has a very impressive offering, justifying the small price premium over base MSRP. At the current time of writing, the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G can be found at $339.99 online, which puts it above reference MSRP, but it does offer a factory overclock, a small overall package size, and great cooling with a lot of overclocking potential in our testing.
As a quick summary, the GeForce RTX 5060 has 3,840 CUDA Cores, 120 Tensor Cores, 30 RT Cores, 48 ROPs, and a GPU Boost Clock of 2497MHz. The GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G has a factory overclock boost set at 2595MHz. It also has 8GB of GDDR7 on a 128-bit bus at 28Gbps, providing 448GB/s, and runs on PCIe 5.0 x8 with a TDP of 145W. GIGABYTE offers several models, and the GAMING OC sits just below the highest-end model, AORUS ELITE, so it is at the top end of GIGABYTE’s offerings.
Gameplay Performance
In our gameplay testing, we focused on the 1080p gameplay experience and used a mix of games that have ‘always on’ ray tracing, regular raster games, and then turned on some extra ray tracing options in a couple of games. The conclusion that can be drawn from our gameplay graphing is that the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G was playable in all games at native resolution. Only in Cyberpunk 2077 were all of our comparison cards playable natively. The GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G was on top in every single game we tested. The average margin over the comparison video cards was 27%. Looking specifically at NVIDIA-based cards generation to generation, the margin was 24% with a range of 12% to 34%.
As we explained, we did have to adjust the quality presets in a few of our games to achieve playable FPS across the spectrum of video cards. This was generally only one notch down from what we customarily use in testing. As well, we used only two ray-traced enabled games, down from our usual four, due to playability. All testing was performed at 1920×1080. As was also discussed, Horizon Forbidden West showed the most obvious effect of limited VRAM.
In the ray tracing sample of two, interestingly, the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition snuck in and grabbed one of the top spots running in native rendering (by 1 FPS). The average margin for the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G was 22% otherwise.
Upscaling simply made good into better, but also brought all the video cards’ playable framerates with minimal exceptions. This also allowed the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G to show a playable framerate in both Ray Traced games, allowing the card to be playable in ALL games tested. Upscaled margins for the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G mirrored the results of the native resolution testing.
Overall, the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G performed very well against good competition. The uplift was generally in the ballpark of 27% over previous generation video cards. The gameplay was smooth and the visuals impressive.
Overclocking, Power & Temp
The base TDP for the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G is 145W TDP. According to our power testing, the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G hit exactly this in our board power testing, at 145W, so it was not excessive, and ran as expected on power demand. This puts it at consuming a bit more power than the GeForce RTX 4060, but much less than the Radeon RX 7600, Intel car,d and Radeon RX 7600 XT. When overclocked, it only consumed 10 more Watts. Our conclusion on power is that the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G will be a very efficient video card for SFF builds, and work in cases with lesser capacity power supplies really well.
Also, because of the lower power draw and great cooling, the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G ran very cool at just 61c while gaming. So once again, in a small form factor case or cramped scenarios, it should remain well-cooled. Since this video card meets NVIDIA-SFF specs, it fits the theme well in power, temp, and overall size.
Overclocking the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G was quite simple, actually. The GIGABYTE Control Center software is easy to use, and honestly, there are few adjustments. The power limit increase is a mere 6%. At any rate, we achieved a 21% overclock, which translated to an 8.5% FPS uplift. This video card should be overclocked manually to gain improved performance. This is demonstrated by the fact that the fastest video card in every game was the overclocked GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G. Backed by excellent cooling, the card can take it without consequence.
Final Points
The GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G is a well-designed video card from GIGABYTE. Coming in as a top-end variant of GIGABYTE’s GeForce RTX 5060 lineup, it has a factory overclock and great cooling in a small package, but with triple-fans. Though GIGABYTE offers a more expensive ELITE model, the GAMING OC is really the overall well-rounded and friendlier option when it comes to pricing.
The overall multi-layered textured design is quite interesting, and gives the video card some flair that you can actually feel. The sliding-side plate for the RGB is interesting, if a bit minor in terms of overall impact on the end-user’s experience. What makes this video card appealing is its form factor, size, and compact nature, with a performance advantage over the previous generation and overclocking ability with lower power. The only downside is the 8GB VRAM buffer, but this is just the nature of the GeForce RTX 5060 itself.
If you are in the market for a well-built budget gaming video card that will fit in nearly any PC case you could imagine, coupled with very good 1080p performance, the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 GAMING OC 8G is a great option for gaming.
