Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5060 OC Low Profile 8G Performance
Compared to NVIDIA’s RTX PRO SFF cards, the trade-off for the far lower price of low-profile cards like Gigabyte’s is the lower amount of memory. As is the standard for RTX 5060 cards, Gigabyte’s RTX 5060 LP ships with just 8GB of memory, versus 16GB or 24GB on the PRO cards. For the consumer/gaming market, this generally is not a significant impact since most games run just fine within the confines of 8GB. It means that anyone wanting to use the card for AI model inference is going to have some pretty heavy limits.
Geekbench 6 AI
On this note, we will start out with a quick look at Geekbench AI performance, pitting the RTX 5060 LP up against the only NVIDIA video card that is even smaller, the single-slot RTX A1000.
Amusing, the larger double-wide video card gets roughly double the DirectML performance here across the board for single precision, half precision, and quantized models.
MLPerf 1.5
As well, we have also run MLPerf 1.5 to get a more holistic look at AI performance on the card.
The overall performance results are not chart-topping by any means, but it is a good deal better than what integrated graphics would offer, which would be the only other option for an SFF PC with half-height slots.
Why This Card
A bit of behind-the-scenes here, we purchased this card alongside the SPARKLE Intel Arc A310 Eco 4GB Low Profile PCIe GPU to put into the Minisforum MS-02 Ultra. In either case, you are stuck with not much space and a small, low-profile card slot, albeit a double-slot one.
You can see a few more shots of this in the video for the MS-02 Ultra.
While it may only have 8GB of memory, the addition of the NVIDIA encode/decode pipelines, the ability to play games decently on it, and perhaps run small models were major pluses of this card. At the same time, for those looking to do more serious AI work, 8GB is not a lot by modern LLM standards. Since we used the card in that review, we thought we should also give it a dedicated feature, even if an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 is a well-known quantity at this point.
Final Words
Wrapping things up, Gigabyte’s GeForce RTX 5060 OC Low Profile 8G fills a role in the market for video cards that, even though it has been reduced to more of a niche these days, is still an important one. With small-form-factor PCs arguably becoming more popular than ever for workstation/development roles (just see the popularity and proliferation of high-end GB10 boxes and systems such as the Mac Studio), there is still a strong need for low-profile video cards to fit in some of these SFF systems. And the overall slim pickings for low-profile cards means that Gigabyte’s card stands out all the more because of this.
Overall, Gigabyte has been able to make the most of the limited space offered by a low-profile card, turning out an RTX 5060 that is only a little more than half the size of its peers, yet runs at the same power limits and delivers the same performance. This is important not only for ensuring the card is competitive with regular RTX 5060 cards at around $350, but also for enabling Gigabyte to deliver as much performance as possible within the form factor. Especially with contemporary pro cards being significantly underclocked in order to hit sub-75 Watt TDPs, the ability to draw more performance from the RTX 5060 LP (albeit at the cost of more power) is a feather in Gigabyte’s cap.
Ultimately, we are relieved to see that companies such as Gigabyte have continued to produce low-profile GeForce cards for the broader market. It is a niche, to be sure, but for SFF PC owners who are counting on using low-profile consumer cards, the availability of performant, cost-competitive cards such as this makes all the difference in the world.
Where To Buy
If you wanted to find the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5060 OC Low Profile 8G online, here is an Amazon Affiliate link.
