MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16G Ventus 2X Plus Review: Fast 1080p and smooth 1440p gaming provided you can get one at $429 MSRP

All this makes sense only if you can get the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB at MSRP, which is very unlikely going by current store prices.

The RTX 5060 Ti is also a better bet than opting for the RTX 4060 Ti or even the RTX 4070 12 GB (if your retailer still stocks one), but a slight budget stretch along with a bit of luck can get you the RTX 5070 for a reasonable price. Despite having only 12 GB of VRAM, the RTX 5070 outperforms the RTX 5060 Ti in every aspect.

The MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Ventus 2X Plus can be had from online retailers near to the suggested $429 MSRP. In India, the GPU officially priced at ₹47,000 but prices at retailers currently seem to be on the higher side.

Nvidia's Blackwell architecture has the potential to find itself among the majority gaming crowd with the introduction of the RTX 5060 Ti based on the GB206 GPU.

GB206 offers a 6% higher CUDA core count than the RTX 4060 Ti and comes with all 4,608 of them enabled. You also get 36 RT cores and a welcome 16 GB VRAM on a 128-bit GDDR7 interface. This is also the first of the Blackwell cards where the PCIe Gen 5 speeds are limited to x8 instead of x16, but this shouldn't have any impact on the card's performance itself.

In this review, we take a look at the MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16G Ventus 2X Plus, which is among the many Nvidia add-in board (AiB) partner offerings that is supposed to retail at the suggested $429 MSRP. 

There's an 8 GB version of the RTX 5060 Ti as well, but Nvidia isn't sampling them to reviewers for obvious reasons.

The MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16G Ventus 2X Plus is built similar to the RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X OC that we had reviewed previously. The RTX 5060 Ti, however, is a single-slot card that measures 22.5 x 10.5 x 4 cm and weighs about 590 g.

Being a Ventus card, the aesthetics are as simple as they can get. There's no RGB of any kind or a VBIOS toggle, and box contains no accessories save for a quick start guide.

The plastic front shroud is accompanied by a metal backplate at the rear.

We used the following to evaluate the RTX 5060 Ti 16G:

• Cooler Master MasterFrame 700 open test bench
• Intel Core i9-14900K with Intel Extreme profile set in the BIOS
• Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Master motherboard
• Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus Gen4 2 TB NVMe SSD and 2x Crucial MX500 1 TB SATA SSDs for OS, benchmarks, and games
• 2x 16 GB Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5-6400 RAM with timings 32-39-39-80 at 1.40 V
• Aorus FO32U2P 4K 240 Hz QD-OLED monitor
• Thermaltake TH420 V2 Ultra EX ARGB AiO cooler
• Cooler Master MVE Gold V2 1250 ATX 3.0 fully modular PSU

Windows 11 24H2 with the latest patches, together with Nvidia Game Ready Driver version 575.94 issued to the press was used.

We would like to thank Cooler Master for supplying the test bench and PSU, Gigabyte for the motherboard and QD-OLED monitor, Sabrent for the SSD, Thermaltake for the AiO cooler, Kingston for the DDR5 memory kit, and finally Nvidia for the RTX 5060 Ti.

The RTX 5060 Ti Ventus 2X Plus offers a good 26% performance gain over the Inno3D RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB Twin X2 in cumulative synthetic tests while trailing the Aorus RTX 4070 Ti Master by a similar margin.

The RTX 5070 Founders Edition is 42% faster than the RTX 5060 Ti in overall synthetic benchmarks.

Nvidia isn't pitching the RTX 5060 Ti as an ML accelerator, but it is notable that the latest Blackwell GPU yields a massive 42% improvement over the RTX 4060 Ti in MLPerf.

Additionally, the RTX 5060 Ti manages to swing ahead of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the RX 7900 XT in V-Ray benchmarks, where AMD cards typically face challenges.

The RTX 5060 Ti Ventus 2X Plus also exceeds expectations in LuxMark tests, even outperforming the AMD RDNA 3 flagships in LuxMark Room.

In pure raster gaming, the RTX 5060 Ti surges ahead of the RTX 4060 Ti, primarily due to increased CUDA core and higher VRAM.