Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Deals The arrival of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 makes Nvidia's Ampere architecture finally available on the budget market. $70 (around $50, AU$90) cheaper than the popular Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, this budget GPU is aimed at consumers who can't or won't shell out $400/$400 or more on a graphics card. This includes GTX 1060 users who have been waiting for the right time and the right price to upgrade to the current generation. With the Nvidia GTX 1060 still being the most abundant card available on the market today, according to the Steam Hardware Survey, Nvidia may have a good sector to sell the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, even if it ships with a higher price. After all, the GTX 1060 has been on the market for almost 5 years, having made its auspicious debut in August 2016. And it's a fraction of the speed of the RTX 3060. It wouldn't be an easy sell, though. The GTX 1060 is not only capable of tackling many of the best PC games to come, but it's still the cheapest proposition around. Meanwhile, the RTX 3060 Ti offers the kind of extra performance that makes the extra cost worth it.
(Image credit: future)
Prices and availability
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 launched on February 25, 2021, starting at $329 (around $240, AU$430). However, the price is a bit tricky. Unlike previous entries in the Nvidia Ampere line, Team Green isn't releasing a Founder's Edition of the RTX 3060, just like it did with the GTX 1660 Ti with the Turing line. So while the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 Black XC we review here will retail for $329 (around $240, AU$430), there will be a full range of Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics cards. There will be RTX cards. Cooler designs, offering better overclocking capabilities and can even be overclocked right out of the box. These cards are likely to perform faster than the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 Black XC, but only marginally, and may not be worth the extra expense. Nvidia is specifically targeting the RTX 3060 at gamers who have stuck with the Pascal-based GTX 1060 since its launch in 2016. This makes sense, since upgrading your graphics card with every other generation seems to be a common thing, but prices have drastically changed. since 2016. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 launched for €249 (£238, AU$429), significantly less than the RTX 3060 at €329 (about $240, AU$430). price increase that some GTX 1060 users might not be able to justify. Then, on the other hand, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti costs an extra $70 (about $50, AU$90) to $399 (about $299, AU$540). That's a pretty big price increase, but if you're already well over the $300 / £300 / AU$400 mark, you might as well get something that gives you the best possible experience. It's hard to pinpoint exactly who to recommend this graphics card to, especially since we're assuming Nvidia will release budget Amp cards at some point, and everything will be out of stock for some time. However, Nvidia is trying to fight the lure of cryptocurrency miners with the RTX 3060, using a combination of hardware and software to cripple its hash rate. Whether or not this will help keep the price of the card down remains to be seen, but hopefully it will. Once this card starts to see its price rise closer to the RTX 3060 Ti, its value drops rapidly.
(Image credit: future)
Features and chipset
Like the rest of the Nvidia RTX 3000 series graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 3060 is based on Nvidia's new Ampere architecture. With the switch from Turing to Ampere, Nvidia is bringing more than just a higher product number to the table.
The biggest change in amps is in the SM data path. Where previous generations had separate pipelines for Integer and Floating Point 32 (FP32) workloads, Nvidia has effectively doubled the number of cores that can handle standard FP32 work, which turns out to be very important for gaming performance. Because of this, the number of CUDA cores per SM has doubled to 128, instead of the 64 found in something like the RTX 2060.
This means that while the RTX 3060 actually has less SM at 28 than the RTX 2060 at 30, the CUDA core count drops to 3584 on the RTX 3060 compared to last-gen 1920s. That's a huge boost, and one of the main reasons the RTX 3060 is seeing a surge in gaming workloads.
And if you go even further back in time with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, which Nvidia is heavily targeting users with the 3060, the old Pascal-based favorite only has 1.280 CUDA cores.
The scale here isn't perfect though, but thanks to this huge difference in the number of shaders available for the RTX 3060, it's capable of achieving twice the performance of the GTX 1060 in many games.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is also equipped with 12 GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 192-bit bus. And, well, it's a bit strange that this graphics card has such a gigantic amount of memory.
To put that in perspective, the only Ampere graphics card that has more RAM is the RTX 3090, a graphics card that caters to both creative professionals and gamers with more money than common sense.
Putting that much VRAM on a graphics card intended for 1080p gaming just doesn't make a lot of sense, and that's probably why the graphics card is priced at such a strange $329, rather than the price. €299 than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 sold for once, the RTX 2060 Super launched in July 2019.
The graphics card doesn't perform particularly well at 1440p, and at 1080p many games won't require 12GB of VRAM for very long. Some titles will use more than 8GB, but you won't really get a noticeable performance boost if you don't have them.
Nvidia tells us that it ended up using 12GB of VRAM because with the 192-bit memory bus, the GPU could be loaded with either 6GB or 12GB of memory, and the company wanted to give users more memory than the GPU could deliver. We applaud this decision, but we can't help but wonder why this decision was made here and not with the Nvidia RTX 3080 or RTX 3070, where more VRAM could certainly help at 4K.
And you can't really talk about Nvidia Ampere without talking about ray tracing and super deep sampling (DLSS). Both technologies are supported by the RTX 3060, though the smaller GPU means there's less dedicated hardware for RT and DLSS workloads.
But the fewer RT cores shouldn't be much of a problem, especially at 1080p. However, what is more important than ray tracing here is DLSS. For a graphics card in this segment, the ability to get a bit more performance at 1080p will be a win no matter how you slice it. It can really mean the difference between 45 and 60 fps, even with ray tracing enabled in many games.
And, given the quality of the DLSS 2.0 algorithm, we recommend turning it on whenever it's available in the game you're playing.
(Image credit: future)
Integrated
Because the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 Black XC is one of the cheaper versions of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, it's a pretty basic graphics card. You won't find flashy RGB lighting or custom backplates, but that simplicity works in your favor. The graphics card has two fans, fitted with the EVGA logo, and they sit on a heat sink that extends just a tiny bit above the PCB. It's the kind of graphics card design you've seen hundreds of times, but thanks to its simple black color scheme, it's a graphics card that fits into any PC build. The EVGA RTX 3060 Black XC is also exceptionally small. It's still a dual-slot card, single-slot graphics cards probably won't come back, but it's incredibly short. At just 7,94 inches (201,8mm) long, you should have no problem fitting this graphics card into any PC case. With the size of some of the RTX 3000 graphics cards, it's incredibly refreshing to see a GPU that could fit into a mini-ITX case without much effort. It's powered by a single 8-pin PCIe connector, which means you don't have to worry about an unsightly 12-pin adapter. Again, another bonus for users who want to fit into a smaller enclosure. I/O is incredibly simple, too, with three DisplayPorts and one HDMI 2.1 port. There's still no USB-C video output here, and we still think that's a shame. Considering the importance of GPUs to creative professionals, from photo editing to 3D modeling, it's a shame that Nvidia's newest graphics cards have dropped support for USB-C video output. Image 1 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 2 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 3 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 4 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 5 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 6 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 7 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 8 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 9 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 10 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 11 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 12 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 13 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 14 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 15 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 16 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 17 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 18 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 19 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 20 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; Future) Image 21 of 27
(Image credit: Infogram; ...