At long last, NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3060 is finally out in the wild, aiming to replace the humble GTX 1060 as the de-facto gaming GPU for the masses. While we couldn’t get our hands on one of the AIB cards, various reviewers have posted their thoughts online across a variety of flavours of the RTX 3060. The consensus? It’s slightly faster than 2019’s RTX 2060 Super and is a significant upgrade over the GTX 1060 for a slightly higher price (if they hold).
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Specs
Specs | RTX 3060 | RTX 3060 Ti |
| CUDA Cores | 3584 | 4864 |
| Boost Clock (GHz) | 1.78 GHz | 1.67 GHz |
| Base Clock (GHz) | 1.32 GHz | 1.41 Ghz |
| VRAM | 12 GB | 8 GB |
| Memory Interface Width | 192-bit | 256-bit |
| Graphics Card Power (W) | 170 W | 200 W |
| Required System Power (W) | 550 W | 600 W |
| Price | $329/Rs. 29,500 | $399/Rs.35,900 |
One key thing to note about the RTX 3060 is that it packs 12 GB of VRAM, albeit capped at a lower bandwidth compared to the 3060 Ti’s 8 GB. We noted in our review of the latter that we found 8 GB a bit limiting for the long run in games over 1440p. However, considering the increasing requirements of games thanks to next-gen consoles, a 12 GB capacity for the would-be 1060-replacement sounds quite good for gamers intending to keep it for a long time. We’re yet to see what AMD’s answer to this (RX 6600 series) will look like, but we can expect similar specifications.
RTX 3060 Review Roundup
Linus Tech Tips’ review of the RTX 3060 was extremely favourable, showcasing a marginal performance improvement over the 2060 Super while being well behind its bigger brother, the RTX 3060 Ti. The review also shows that their card (an MSI Ventus 2X RTX 3060) strayed close to the thermal performance and noise of the 2060 Super and 1060, boosting to 1.9 GHz core clock speed.
“In raytracing performance, we found that it [3060] is somewhere around a 2070-2070 Super.”
GamersNexus’ review of the card (EVGA 3060 XC Black Edition) showed testing across various games at 1080p, 1440p and 4K, with frequency and thermal validations as well.
The RTX 3060 is now available to order starting at Rs. 29,500 but we expect prices to increase if current supply issues and sudden crypto-mining boom still persist. Whether NVIDIA’s attempts to curb the latter will help sell more RTX cards to gamers, we’ll have to wait and see.