NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 only from AIBs

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 only available from board partners.

Official render of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, Source: NVIDIA

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 will be released by board partners only. NVIDIA has no plans to launch its reference design under Founders Edition, a report from Cowcotland indicates. The slides that were used during the card’s announcement, have not featured any reference design, which normally means that the manufacturer isn’t planning to launch its own cooler.

However, the official render that was published by the company on the website (attached above) shows a new cooler design that was not used by any other Ampere-based graphics card so far. The render appears to show a blower-type design without any power connector. The GeForce RTX 3060 indeed needs less power (170W) than RTX 3060 Ti (200W), but it is still more than a PCIe connector can sustain by itself. What this means is that the render was never meant to show a final design that will be available to customers, it simply is a marketing material.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 is based on 8nm GA106-300 GPU featuring 3584 CUDA cores. The graphics card is equipped with 12GB of GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit bus. Although the card has faster memory than RTX 3060 Ti (15 Gbps vs 14 Gbps), the narrower bus reduces the bandwidth to 360 GB/s, which is lower by 88 GB/s compared to the Ti variant.

NVIDIA announced that the new graphics card will be available by the end of February at a price starting at 329 USD.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 AIB Designs, Source: NVIDIA

Source: Cowcotland