It’s time to sound the alarm, people, because Nvidia has confirmed that the RTX 3060 will definitely come out on Thursday, February 25, indicating that previous rumors were actually about the money. The £ 299 / $ 329 graphics card will be the cheapest graphics card in Nvidia’s next generation to date, and will likely sell very quickly, just like the rest of Nvidia’s RTX 30 family.
Unlike previous launches, it looks like the RTX 3060 will be on sale a little later than previous RTX 30 cards. According to The Verge, retailers are opening orders for the RTX 3060 at 09:00 PT / 12:00 ET / 17:00 GMT on February 25, so make a reminder if you hope to pick one up.
The RTX 3060 is the fifth RTX 30 series GPU that Nvidia has launched in the last few months, and judging by the performance of its slightly more powerful brother, the RTX 3060 Ti, it will probably be a good replacement for anyone with an aging. GTX 1060 card. Indeed, the most attractive thing about the RTX 3060 is its 12 GB GDDR6 VRAM, which is actually 4 GB more than what you get on the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070. The RTX 3060 does not have as many CUDA cores as the RTX 3060. Ti, and its clock speed is not that fast either, but I would be interested to see how much it accumulates once I get my hands on an overview sample.
Unlike previous RTX 30 launches, there is no Nvidia Founders Edition of the RTX 3060 on sale on February 25th, so you will need to purchase one of the many third party cards that will be available such as: Asus, Zotac , Gigabyte, Palit and MSI to name a few. As such, prices are likely to differ significantly from Nvidia’s initial starting point of £ 299 / $ 329, depending on how overclocked they are in the factory or how fine their cooling device is – as is usually the case with third-party cards.
It’s not yet clear how many RTX 3060s will be available at Nvidia’s initial price, as UK retailers have not yet listed what they’ll have in stock – though the stock situation is similar to that of Nvidia’s previous RTX 30 launches says almost does not exist), prices will probably only rise higher and higher as demand increases. Indeed, the Asus TUF GeForce RTX 3080 OC I reviewed late last year when the RTX 3080 first came out was intended to cost £ 680 at launch, but now retailers are calling it a whopping £ 900 – which is quite the make-up. Hopefully the RTX 3060 prices will not rise rather so high but fingers crossed, there will be at least some cards available for longer than five minutes.