Thanks to the lower power consumption of the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti and the use of more compact printed circuit boards in the new GeForce RTX 50 series, Gigabyte offers cards with a unique design in the WindForce 2X and Eagle model lines. Their PCB extends only halfway along the PCIe slot. This allows the use of a compact dual-fan cooler with an unobstructed heatsink behind the rear fan, which delivers excellent cooling performance for its size.
The card is equipped with a compact dual-slot cooler featuring two low-profile fans that blow air onto a heatsink with transverse fins. These are mounted in a gray plastic shroud.
The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti utilizes only half the PCI Express 5.0 x16 lane count. Gigabyte didn’t overcomplicate things – they not only trimmed the slot to eight lanes but also shortened the entire PCB. You’re unlikely to find shorter cards offering similar performance.
This unconventional design also required some creativity in placing the power connector. Gigabyte positioned it on the opposite end of the PCB from the usual – right behind the bracket. This allows the power cable to be routed along the rear panel of the case and managed more cleanly than with connectors placed mid-card.
From top and bottom views, it’s clear that the atypical design primarily serves more efficient cooling. From the top, you can see that even on such a short, compact card, the fin stack extends freely under the rear fan. The fans are counter-rotating, as is typical for many Gigabyte generations, which contributes significantly to smoother and less disruptive acoustic performance.
The rear cover of the card is metal. Warm air from the heatsink can escape freely above the card through a large opening in the rear part of the backplate.
Given the heatsink’s dimensions, the fans are quite large – the shroud around them is only a few millimeters thick. The impellers measure nearly 10 cm in diameter but are just 8 mm tall. The blades are thus long and thin, which means extra caution is needed during operation, as they are easily breakable if anything comes into contact with them while spinning.
The transverse-fin heatsink is split into two blocks and fills most of the space under the shroud. A side view shows that the cooler’s base draws heat from the GPU and, with thermal gel, also from the memory and power delivery components. There’s also gel between the PCB and the backplate.
Gigabyte’s use of thermal gel instead of traditional thermal pads is evident in the cooling of some power MOSFETs.
The card weighs just 628 g, making it not only compact but also exceptionally light.
Its length is just under 22 cm, it’s only slightly over 2 cm wider than the bracket, and it fits within two expansion slots.
The bracket features a standard output configuration – three DisplayPort 2.1b connectors with UHBR20 and one HDMI 2.1b port.
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