Nvidia may be giving its partners more freedom with its upcoming GeForce RTX 5060 Ti GPUs. The new mid-rangers have been spotted rocking both the old 8-pin and the revised 12V-2×6 power connectors alongside a cut-down PCIe interface.
Folks at VideoCardz managed to get their hands on a bunch of MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti photos that showcase four models, including a white triple-fan Gaming Trio, a black triple-fan Gaming Trio, a black dual-fan Gaming model, and a dual-fan version of the brass/gold-looking Inspire design.
All models share a similar PCIe 5.0 x8 interface instead of the usual 16 lanes found on RTX 5070 and above. Though potentially limiting for those planning to upgrade an old PCIe 3.0 platform, this shouldn’t cause any meaningful performance impact on Gen 4 and Gen 5 interfaces. As a reminder, PCIe bandwidth doubles with each generation, meaning that RTX 5060 Ti’s PCIe 5.0 8x connection delivers full PCIe 4.0 x16 speed. Though for that you would need a newer Gen 5-ready motherboard.
Another perhaps more interesting change compared to its higher-tier siblings is the availability of two distinct power connector options. Whereas RTX 5070 and up are forced into the controversial 12V-2×6 header, partners seem to have the choice to select the tried and tested 8-pin connector. A great news for those still rocking ATX 2.x PSUs that lack both the original 12VHPWR and the revised 12V-2×6 cables. This will also reassure those scared by melting issues, even though the risk is low thanks to these cards’ lower power targets.
As things stand, RTX 5060 Ti is expected to take around 180W, 150W of which can be fed through the 8-pin, with the remaining 30W via the PCIe slot. Nvidia is planning two variants, one featuring 16GB of GDDR7 memory and another with only 8GB. Performance should be identical in games that require less than 8GB of VRAM since both share the GB206 GPU with 4,608 CUDA cores.
The take-away from all of this is that if MSI is planning 8-pin versions of its RTX 5060 Ti cards, Nvidia is surely aware and authorising it. Thus, you can expect to see similar options from other brands as the launch approaches.
