MSI Unveils Most Powerful Graphics Card for Mini-ITX: The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Aero IT

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Since Nvidia's Ampere architecture turns out to be rather power hungry, it takes graphics card vendors a lot of time and effort to build smaller GeForce RTX 30-series boards for Mini-ITX systems. MSI this week became the world's first manufacturer to build a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti-based card for small form-factor systems.

MSI's GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Aero graphics board is powered by Nvidia's GA104-200 graphics processing unit with 4864 CUDA cores that is paired with 8GB of GDDR6 memory connected to the GPU using a 256-bit interface. The card has one eight-pin auxiliary PCIe power connector and uses a dual-slot single-fan cooling system with four heat pipes that directly touch the GPU for extra efficiency.

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Since the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Aero is small, has a relatively constrained 200W power budget, and limited cooling capabilities, MSI decided not to overclock the GA104 processor, so it cannot boost beyond 1665MHz. Meanwhile, the GPU's FP32 compute throughput at such frequency is around 16 TFLOPS, which makes the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Aero the world's highest-performing Mini-ITX graphics card.

Just like full-size GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards, the RTX 3060 Ti Aero board has four display outputs: an HDMI 2.1 as well as three DisplayPort 1.4a connectors.

In addition to the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Aero, MSI also introduced its GA106-powered GeForce RTX 3060 Aero ITX 12G OC and GeForce RTX 3060 Aero ITX 12G with 3584 CUDA cores.

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MSI did not reveal MSRPs, partly because Mini-ITX cards based on Nvidia's Ampere architecture are rare, but to a large degree because retail prices of graphics boards today has nothing to do with MSRPs.