Nvidia RTX 4060 Review – Testing ZOTAC GAMING’s RTX 4060 SOLO 163mm Long GPU for the Small Form Factor Market

Let’s be very clear before we begin: we are looking at the RTX 4060 from a small form factor perspective. I intentionally requested the ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 4060 SOLO, and not a two or three fan OC card. This is a very small, single fan GPU. This means we’re looking at this from a different angle than a traditional review. We will, of course, have performance numbers for the card. However, our conclusion will be focused more on efficiency and performance per liter then raw performance and value.
As I said in the RTX 4060Ti review: Small Form Factor users aren’t immune to wanting a good value. However, it’s hard to take a moral high ground on value when we decided to pay three times as much for cases that use one-quarter the metal, to house components that have half the function at twice the price. What do we do we these spacing saving builds? Put them prominently on our desks to take up space, and complain about how loud they are.
Let’s dig in by starting with the card we will...

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[nightshift]

The PCI connector is 4.0x8 and not 4x16, not uncommon on 4060s.

I did not know that it results in that. Seeing the other models, they have all their "teeth". Should I modify the BIOS settings accordingly? I vaguely remember that the pcie settings feature an 8x8 or x16 option. Is that something I should do here?

 

[SFFMunkee]

I did not know that it results in that. Seeing the other models, they have all their "teeth". Should I modify the BIOS settings accordingly? I vaguely remember that the pcie settings feature an 8x8 or x16 option. Is that something I should do here?

You'll probably find that many of them have all the pins on the finger connector but they aren't actually wired (except for may power delivery pins)

Shouldn't make a difference for required BIOS settings at all, as it's still got all the required pins for PCIe x8

 

[rfarmer]

I was looking up specs on various 4060 models and both Zotac and MSI list theirs as 4.0x8 while Asus and Gigabyte only say PCI 4.0. PNY lists theirs as PCI-Express 4.0 x16 (x8 Active).

 

[SFFMunkee]

I was looking up specs on various 4060 models and both Zotac and MSI list theirs as 4.0x8 while Asus and Gigabyte only say PCI 4.0. PNY lists theirs as PCI-Express 4.0 x16 (x8 Active).

The actual 4060 chipset is only able to use 8 lanes anyways, so if anyone claims it's using/connecting to x16 then it's bullshit.

 

[nightshift]

The actual 4060 chipset is only able to use 8 lanes anyways, so if anyone claims it's using/connecting to x16 then it's bullshit.

Awesome. At least here, it's what you see is what you get. Anyway, I'm still using my pcie 3.0 riser that came with the case - love that it's sleeved, high quality and it was perfect for my 2060. I wonder though, should I get a 4.0 here? Would that result in meaningful gains with this little card?

 

[SFFMunkee]

Awesome. At least here, it's what you see is what you get. Anyway, I'm still using my pcie 3.0 riser that came with the case - love that it's sleeved, high quality and it was perfect for my 2060. I wonder though, should I get a 4.0 here? Would that result in meaningful gains with this little card?

You might get 4.0 if you're lucky, assuming your motherboard/CPU support that. But equally likely you might have issues getting anything at all, or issues with getting access to the UEFI settings pre-boot. You may have to set your PCIe slot to 3.0 manually in UEFI to get it to work properly at all.

IIRC the reason this happens is that the signalling rates for 4.0 are noticeably higher so the quality of the transmission wires needs to be much higher and its more susceptible to noise and other issues.