[Hardware] GeForce RTX 3060 12GB Review: Hope Springs Eternal

[HiTLeR]

The GeForce RTX 3060 12GB brings the theoretical price down to just $329, but when will it actually hit that price?

 

 

The Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB brings a new level of performance to the mainstream market--sort of. Officially, the RTX 3060 launches today with prices starting at just $329. Realistically? You're as likely to find one at that price as you are to find an RTX 3060 Ti at $399, RTX 3070 at $499, or RTX 3080 at $699 — not entirely impossible, perhaps, but highly unlikely. Nvidia's Ampere architecture now powers many of the best graphics cards, and they're all seeing massive levels of demand from both gamers and cryptocurrency miners. Nvidia has added firmware and driver code to detect Ethereum mining, which should help a bit, but when people are willing to pay extreme scalper pricing on eBay, even for cards like the GTX 1660 Super and RTX 2060, everything in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy is pretty much sold out right now. Nvidia is even working with partners to bring back previous generation Turing and Pascal cards.

 

None of that makes this a bad GPU, but we expect the RTX 3060 to be just as difficult to acquire as any other modern GPU. Eventually, the current Ethereum mining boom will fade away, but it could take a year or more before we see the end of chip shortages. That shouldn't surprise anyone at this point, but if you've been hoping for a reasonably priced gaming PC upgrade, it's a depressing state of affairs. 

 

 

Unlike the previous Ampere GPUs, Nvidia won't offer an RTX 3060 Founders Edition, so we're looking at a third-party card. Nvidia shipped us the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC for this launch review, a reasonably compact and relatively unassuming card. There's no metal (or even plastic) backplate, no RGB lighting, and two custom-sized 87mm fans for cooling with a 2.0-slot form factor. The card measures 202x110x38mm and weighs 653g, which is quite the change of pace compared to the other third-party Ampere cards we've reviewed so far.

 

There are reasons for that, of course. Creating a mainstream card and decking it out with all the bells and whistles costs money. And we think most gamers shopping for a good value are far better served by modest designs with good performance. There will certainly be extreme variants of the RTX 3060, and some of them will be priced higher than the budget RTX 3060 Ti options. Let's be clear: Even the fastest RTX 3060 won't beat a 3060 Ti in most situations — yes, even with 12GB VRAM. That's because memory capacity isn't a huge factor once you go above 8GB, and having more memory bandwidth, thanks to its wider memory bus, gives the 3060 Ti a big advantage. Also, the 3060 Ti has 35% more GPU cores.