Great review!
Yes the 8Gb memory is a negative, but does it play current games at a better frame rate using less energy and for less money? Yes, yes and yes! It may pose a problem for future games at max settings, but lets be honest, most people who are into PC gaming will be looking to upgrade in 2 - 3 years anyway, to something like the 5060 which you would hope will have more VRAM.
I'm definitely in the minority, but I think the 4060 is a great overall product. It represents a huge move forward in frames per watt, and as you say it opens up some exciting opportunities for those on a limited power budget and case volume.
I personally value an increase in frames per watt just as much as an increase in frames per dollar, because if you're limited to for example 130w for your GPU, then you're going to get almost double the frames per second moving from a 3000 series to a 4000 series for the same wattage.
Perhaps the PC gaming market has come to expect 50% gains in FPS from generation to generation and we've become desensitized to this, but previous generations have done this by increasing the TDP, how long could we continue doing that before we're looking at 2000w power supplies and 5 slot cards?
The 4060 is the first 60 series card we've seen since 2016 with a TDP under 120w, it offers more performance than it's predecessor, for a lower MSRP and once you also consider inflation the price is lower still. Personally I think it's a great move forward, particularly for the SFF market, and I hope we can start to see a reduction in TDP's across all GPU tiers in the future generations.
