At the time of writing, Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 3060 graphics card only has an official release date of ‘end of February’, but a new report from WccfTech suggests that Thursday 25 February will be the day it is actually offered for sale . Admittedly, WccfTech does not provide their source for this particular date, so it could all be a bunch of pork water. However, if it is taken with other rumors that have been circulating on the internet lately (and the fact that almost all of Nvidia’s previous RTX 30 cards were also released on a Thursday), there might just be a little truth in it.
In late January, for example, Videocardz allegedly obtained Nvidia’s embargo schedule for the RTX 3060, which states that press and influencers will receive review samples on 19 February. The schedule did not list when the embargo for review would finally rise, nor did it disclose an exact release date for the RTX 3060, but if the sample seed date is indeed true, it seems likely that a global release date of Thursday 25 February is probably about right. The RTX 3070, RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 were finally launched on Thursdays late last year, and it is not uncommon to test just a week before the card is finally offered for sale. The only exception to this rule was the RTX 3060 Ti, which was launched on December 2 – a Wednesday.
As such, there’s still a possibility that February 25th may not be the correct release date – even though we’re almost halfway through February, and I’ve not heard or heard a hair from when more review samples arrive, a more general window somewhere between Monday 22 February and Friday 26 February seems anything but certain. Given how quickly the rest of Nvidia’s RTX 30 family was snapped up at launch, we can of course also expect the stock levels of the RTX 3060 to last 20 seconds before disappearing for a while too. a few months, but I will of course let you know the correct date on the sale date as soon as Nvidia announces it.
The RTX 3060 is the cheapest RTX 30 card to date from Nvidia’s next generation Ampere family of jet-track GPUs, priced from £ 299 / $ 329. It comes with 12 GB of GDDR6 VRAM (which is actually more than the 8 GB you get on the more powerful RTX 3060 Ti on RTX 3070), 3584 CUDA cores (lower than the 4864 on the RTX 3060 Ti), and a basic clock speed of 1320MHz (also lower than the 1410MHz on the Ti). Unlike the rest of Nvidia’s RTX 30 family, however, there will be no Founders Edition of the RTX 3060 available when it’s finally launched; so you have to choose from one of the many third party models that will be on sale if you decide to try one.