NVIDIA’s first RTX 3060 prototype found
Unfortunately, it does not work.
A GeForce RTX 3060 engineering sample has appeared on the NVIDIA subreddit, giving a rare look at a pre-release version of NVIDIA’s 12GB Ampere card. The owner reports that the fans spin up, but the system hangs during boot, so the card does not function in a normal system. Still, as far as I know, this is the first time an RTX 3060 engineering sample has surfaced with clear photos.
Source: hunszen/Reddit
The card carries a PG190 board label, which matches the production PCB used for the retail RTX 3060 (PG190 SKU 060). The date code on the prototype points to week 24 of 2020 , months before Nvidia announced the RTX 3060 on January 12, 2021, and before the retail launch on February 25, 2021. That timing lines up with internal validation and firmware work ahead of mass production.
Source: hunszen/Reddit
NVIDIA did not release a GeForce RTX 3060 Founders Edition, limiting its own reference designs to models such as the RTX 3060 Ti and higher. All retail RTX 3060 cards came from board partners instead. The engineering sample follows the same GA106 configuration as the final product, with 3,584 CUDA cores, 12GB of GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit bus, 360 GB/s bandwidth and a 170W board power, but uses a non-retail cooler and firmware that never shipped, which now makes it more of a collector’s piece than a usable GPU.
Source: Reddit
