The RTX 5060's official spec sheet lists a GB206 die, but ASUS just shipped a card that uses a larger one. A review of the ASUS DUAL GeForce RTX 5060 OC D7 8GB by Korean outlet Quasar Zone found a GB205-200-KB-A1 die inside, the same silicon that powers the RTX 5070 and a few mobile Blackwell parts.
This isn't the first time it's happened. We previously covered MSI doing the same thing back in July with its "V1" RTX 5060 cards, and Yeston and Maxsun followed with their own GB205-based versions shortly after. ASUS is just the latest board partner to get noticed doing it.
The reason comes down to binning. NVIDIA makes far more GB205 dies than it needs for RTX 5070 cards, and some of those chips don't hit the parametric targets required for a 5070, whether that's CUDA core count, ROP count, or TMU count. Rather than scrap them, NVIDIA cuts them down to RTX 5060 specs: 3,840 CUDA cores, 120 TMUs, 48 ROPs, and 8GB of GDDR7 on a 128-bit bus. On paper, that matches the standard GB206-based RTX 5060 exactly.
Performance-wise, it seems to land in about the same place. Quasar Zone's testing showed the GB205 card performing similarly to a regular RTX 5060, with a few results running slightly ahead. That's probably down to this particular ASUS model's factory overclock rather than anything inherent to the bigger die, since NVIDIA disables the same number of cores and the same bus width regardless of which chip it started as.
For potential buyers of the RTX 5060, the die swap mostly matters as a curiosity rather than something worth chasing or avoiding. There's no reported difference in price or box packaging, and the performance stays within spec either way.
Frequently Asked Questions
Open a question for an answer from TweakTown's coverage of this news, or ask your own below.
Did Quasar Zone's benchmarks show any meaningful performance difference between GB205-based and GB206-based RTX 5060 cards?
Could the slightly better results on some GB205 RTX 5060 samples be due to factory overclocks rather than the larger die itself?
What RTX 5060 specifications remain identical regardless of whether the card uses GB205 or GB206 silicon?
What does the use of GB205 dies in RTX 5060 cards indicate about NVIDIA's Blackwell yield management and die routing?
Have a question about this content not listed here? Ask below and TweakBot will answer it.
It does say something about how NVIDIA is managing Blackwell yields, though. GB205 supply looks flexible enough that NVIDIA can route surplus chips into a cheaper tier instead of letting them go to waste, and it looks like more than one AIB has been doing this recently.
