More than a year since I first reviewed the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, I finally managed to get my hands on an 8GB version of it in the form of the Colorful iGame Ultra RTX 5060 Ti. To that end, the card also helped in personally answering my long standing question of just how much game can you get for half the graphics VRAM.
Specification
Design
If you’re unfamiliar with Colorful’s design philosophy, allow me to keep it simple. Much like ASUS, the brand is all about keeping it uniform and clean.
The cooler shroud on this Ultra RTX 5060 Ti is clean-cut and literally square. There is the brand’s standard graffiti accents on the spine of the card, but everything else remains more or less a standard design for a graphics card of this calibre.
On that note, you get the usual number of DisplayPorts and HDMI 2.1 ports. There’s also a dedicated “Turbo” button at the back, but in all honesty, I kept this off as the performance gained from having it turned on wasn’t noticeable in my testing period.
Oh, and on another sidenote, Colorful has seen fit to give this card a triple-fan setup. It feels a bit overkill, but hey, I’m ain’t complaining: the more cooling, the better.
Once again, this RTX 5060 Ti is basically the same as its 16GB sibling, with the major difference being that it has half the VRAM.
Testbench
I’m going to keep things really simple with this review and simply provide a comparison between the two RTX 5060 Ti cards. Given its Blackwell pedigree, it’s safe to say that the 8GB variant would be on par, if not slightly better than the 60-series of the previous generation.
That being said, this is obviously a battle between siblings and, as I stated at the start of this review, this should curb my curiosity about that long-standing question: is 8GB GDDR7 enough for modern gaming these days?
Performance, Temperature, and Power Consumption
The answer is basically yes. Yes, it can, but that prowess is relegated to the realm of Full HD gaming. Any resolution greater than that, and the iGame Ultra RTX 5060 Ti tends to struggle, and that is by no fault of the brand. It’s just the nature of the card.
And don’t let those average frames in the QHD (2560 x 1440) graph fool you; despite the higher-than-average framerates that the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB showed, the 1% lows dipped well below 20 fps. Worse, these dips would happen with a regularity that you’d see in a CPU bottleneck situation. Monster Hunter Wilds, in this case, is the perfect example of this scenario, as the game’s benchmark consistently struggled to maintain a decent average framerate at QHD.
But, as I stated, drop the resolution down to Full HD, and all those problems go away, almost as if they never existed in the first place. The difference is really like night and day; Doom The Dark Ages, a game that has ray tracing baked into the game, runs above 200 fps on average, compared to the 70 fps average I’d get if I were to run the game on QHD resolution.
Of course, running games at Full HD resolution does come with one important benefit, and that’s lower temperature. Even at peak workloads (read: gaming), the triple-fan cooling solution keeps this card running below 70°C.
Conclusion
I have often said – for the past several years, at least – that the sweet spot resolution for gaming is QHD. For the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB, though, that may be a tall glass to fill, but again, this may not necessarily be the manufacturer at fault here.
At RM2,100, the Colorful iGame Ultra RTX 5060 Ti 8GB feels…a tad bit expensive, and I’m starting to understand why NVIDIA was reluctant to ship out this variant to the masses. It’s not a bad GPU, though. Far from it.
Ultimately, this card is certainly great for Full HD gaming, guaranteeing you high average frames, with all the visual trimmings, and yes, that includes ray tracing, upscaling, and frame generation.
Photography by John Law.
