NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB Graphics Card Officially Launches on 25th February, $329 US Starting Price For Mainstream Ampere

NVIDIA launches the GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB graphics card this month but today we get to share the exact date at which you can get your hands on the graphics card. In addition to the launch, the GeForce RTX 3060 has also been listed by various retailers while some users have got their hands on the graphics card several weeks before launch.

When it was announced, the GeForce RTX 3060 was slated to launch in February but NVIDIA never revealed exactly when in February. Now we know that the exact launch date for the RTX 3060 is set for the 25th of February at 6 AM Pacific Time. The graphics card will be available from global retail outlets at a starting price of $329.99 US but as always, the price is just MSRP and actual pricing will differ based on the custom designs and also be largely dependent on the availability of the cards.

At the heart of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card lies the GA106 GPU. The GA106 is one of the many Ampere GPUs that we will be getting on the gaming segment. The GA106 GPU is the third gaming GPU that NVIDIA has produced.

The new shader core on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture is 2.7x faster, the new RT cores are 1.7x faster while the new Tensor cores are up to 2.7x faster than the previous generation Turing GPUs. The 2nd Generation RT core delivers dedicated hardware-accelerated ray-tracing performance & features twice the ray/triangles intersection with concurrent RT graphics and compute operations.

For the GeForce RTX 3060, NVIDIA has enabled a total of 28 SM units on its flagship which results in a total of 3584 CUDA cores, 112 TMUs. In addition to the CUDA cores, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 also comes packed with next-generation RT (Ray-Tracing) cores, Tensor cores, and brand new SM or streaming multi-processor units. The graphics card has a TDP of 170W.

In terms of memory, the GeForce RTX 3060 comes packed with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory. The memory runs across a 192-bit bus wide interface and features an effective clock speed of 15.00 Gbps which delivers a cumulative bandwidth of 360 GB/s which is slightly higher bandwidth than the RTX 2060 6 GB model & you also end up with twice the memory while Ampere's brand new compression architecture makes sure that the GPU isn't bandwidth starved.

Aside from the launch date, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 custom models have already landed in the hands of their first customer. Reddit user, he_never_sleeps, posted pictures of the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 Eagle OC 12 GB graphics card in the EtherMining subreddit.

The user is based in Europe and the reason he got his hands on the card so early on was primarily because the shop had run out of stock for the RTX 3060 Ti graphics card and only had the non-Ti variants in stock which they recently received. According to the user, the card has a memory bandwidth of 360.00 GB/s out of the box and a TDP of 170W. It's expected to deliver a mining hash rate of around 50 MH/s.

As for the card itself, it is a standard dual-slot and dual-fan design that is powered by a single 8-pin connector. The card features an extended cooler and backplate with a large cut-out at the back to dump hot air out of.

Additionally, retailers have started listing down custom NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards with preliminary pre-order prices. The most affordable variant, the ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 3060 Twin Edge, is listed for a price of 428 Euros while the top variant is listed for 600 Euros. The prices are severely inflated but that is to be expected till the official launch of these cards & while we don't expect them to be near the MSRP's, they will be better than the ones mentioned above.

News Source: Casmodem