This GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Has The PCB Chopped In Half For Dual-Fan Flow-Through Designs

For the launch of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 series GPUs, some AIBs took the more featured-packed approach while others opt to shrink the footprint to better accommodate compact PC builds. GIGABYTE has a unique take on the latter approach, having one of its GPU PCB physically half the size of a regular card to allow for more efficient cooling.

A Dual-Fan Flow-Through RTX 5060 Ti Card

The GPU in question is the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB EAGLE model, which unusually features a whole fan’s worth of surface area cut in the backplate to allow flow-through cooling – a common design feature in modern triple-fan GPUs to aid cooling efficiency. Such design requires the PCB to be physically shorter than the heatsinks, and for the dual-fan EAGLE card, the AIB maker opted to shrink the PCB so small that even the PCIe connector has been cut in half.

To be clear, all of these engineering in shrinking the card will not affect the GPU’s performance whatsoever. By default, the RTX 5060 Ti uses PCIe 5.0 x8 signaling through x16 physical connection, meaning half of the surface area on the connector are simply unused; as such, it is possible to shrink the connector down to x8 in physical size while fully utilize the available bandwidth this GPU will use. It’s worth noting that most cards opted to use x16 physical connection for structural reasons, to better support heavier and larger cards.

Of course, even this card shy in comparison to the RTX 5090 Founders Edition card, of which NVIDIA took on a unique engineering challenge of fitting all the circuitry and the gigantic 575W GB202 GPU between two flow-through fans that resulted in an extremely compact PCB and physical footprint that only occupies two PCIe slots.

Source: HardwareLuxx

Pokdepinion: Quite the creative design – the card certainly will perform better in terms of thermals.