Nvidia’s RTX 30 line has been a pain to get for PC enthusiasts, but those who are still waiting to upgrade their GPUs might be the real winners. Nvidia just announced the Nvidia RTX 3060, which fills in the lower-end of the series’ price range.
Even those that have picked up an RTX 30 card might feel a bit cheated when they look at the RTX 3060 specs. The GPU is impressive for the price, and its release date is set for the very near future. Fortunately, for those looking for where to buy the RTX 3060, there’ll be the usual line-up of cards from both Nvidia and partners.
Nvidia RTX 3060 Specs
Without benchmarks, it’s hard to compare the RTX 3060 specs to other cards in the line. According to Nvidia, the card compares to the GTX 1060 as such:
“The GeForce RTX 3060 has twice the raster performance and 10x the ray-tracing performance of the GTX 1060.”
Given that the GTX 1060 was a fairly anemic card (depending on the model), it’s no surprise that the 3060 blows past it in performance. The significant upgrades for someone coming from a GTX 1060 will be in ray-tracing capabilities and VRAM, but general performance should see a considerable improvement as well.
The released specs for the RTX 3060 are:
- 13 shader-TFLOPs
- 25 RT-TFLOPs for ray tracing
- 101 tensor-TFLOPs to power NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling)
- 192-bit memory interface
- 12GB of GDDR6 memory
Clock and memory speeds haven’t been revealed yet and will vary from model to model. However, they’ll likely be similar to what we’ve seen in the rest of the RTX 30 line-up.
Nvidia RTX 3060 release date and pricing
Nvidia has pegged the release date of the RTX 3060 as “late February.” The card will have an MSRP of $329, but as usual, the price will depend on the manufacturer and the model of card.
So far, Nvidia has confirmed the following manufacturers will produce the RTX 3060:
- ASUS
- Colorful
- EVGA
- Gainward
- Galaxy
- Gigabyte
- Innovision 3D
- MSI
- Palit
- PNY
- Zotac
It remains to be seen whether or not the RTX 3060 will be affected by scalpers to the degree others in the RTX 30 line-up have. Retailers may finally have sufficient safeguards in palce to block scalpers. However, buyers will likely have the same issues as we saw during the release of other models.
Where to pre-order and buy the RTX 3060
Nvidia stated that the RTX 3060 can be purchased at major retailers and system builders. However, no particulars have been announced yet. If this launch follows the trend of previous releases, there will be no pre-orders for the RTX 3060.
The RTX 3060 should be a good compromise of power and price for enthusiasts. Hopefully, stock shortages won’t plague this card like it has others.
