It is widely known that the AD106 and AD107 GPUs in RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4060 do not utilize all 16 lanes of PCI Express bus. Despite being restricted to eight lanes, graphics card manufacturers still employ the full-sized connector for those cards. Naturally, those 8 additional lanes are not electrically connected, but the wider connector serves a structural support that may prevent GPU sagging among other things. This is especially useful for cards with large triple-fan designs, which were still developed for the 115W-class graphics card.
Palit’s DUAL and StormX models are both dual slot design, either with one or two fans. Those are the cheapest models from Palit right now and that is for a good reason. In order to attract any consumer those models need to be cheap to manufacture and offer relatively good thermals. Unfortunately, reviews indicate that the DUAL model ranks among the warmest RTX 4060s under load, so cooling is definitely not its strong point.
An interesting ‘feature’ of these cards is reduced PCI Express interface. Instead of using a full-sized interface with 16 lanes, one can find 8 lanes. As shown by Fpsojisan_yt
This applies to both the Dual and StormX models and their clones such as Emtek Dual. This has, of course, no effect on performance, all RTX 4060 on the market that have full PCIe slot do not actually use all those lanes.
However, GPU manufacturers are now maintaining the full size to provide more stability for heftier GPUs, or perhaps just as likely, to retain a mid-range appearance of their GPUs. All X60 class models launched in the previous 15 years had 16 lanes:
- GeForce GTX 260: PCIe 2.0 x16
- GeForce GTX 460: PCIe 2.0 x16
- GeForce GTX 560: PCIe 2.0 x16
- GeForce GTX 660: PCIe 3.0 x16
- GeForce GTX 760: PCIe 3.0 x16
- GeForce GTX 960: PCIe 3.0 x16
- GeForce GTX 1060: PCIe 3.0 x16
- GeForce RTX 2060: PCIe 3.0 x16
- GeForce RTX 3060: PCIe 4.0 x16
- GeForce RTX 4060: PCIe 4.0 x8
Source: Palit
