Nvidia RTX 3060 review: a fine $ 329 GPU, but ho-hum below the 3000 series

The past year of graphics card reviews has been an exercise in dramatic asterisks, and for good reason. Nvidia and AMD have found it appropriate to ensure members of the press have access to new graphics cards ahead of their retail launches, which has put us in a comfortable position to praise each of their latest generation offerings: good prices, tons of power .

Then we see our comment sections explode with unhappy customers wondering how to actually buy them. I have since softened my tune on these pre-launch previews.

I’m saying all this up front about the Nvidia RTX 3060, which goes on sale today, Feb. 25 (at 12 p.m. ET, if you’re interested in getting into the day-one sales battle) because it’s the first Nvidia GPU to go I’ve been testing for a while to make my cautious stance easier. The company has shed a tear with its RTX 3000 series cards in terms of sheer consumer value, especially when compared to previous-generation equivalent cards (despite the $ 1,499 RTX 3090), but the $ 329 RTX 3060 (not to be confused with those of December 3060 Ti) is not quite the same weight. It’s a good 1080p card with 1440p space to bend, but it’s not the next-gen jump in the Nvidia pricing tier we’ve gotten used to.

Plus, unlike other modern Nvidia cards, this one lacks one specific backup reason for investing so heavily: crypto mining potential. (And that’s on purpose on Nvidia’s part.)

Hopefully your plate is better than mine

Ahead of today’s review, Nvidia Ars Technica provided an EVGA version of the RTX 3060 as this model will not receive an Nvidia “Founders Edition” label (the first for a regular RTX card). This 3060 variant keeps things simple in construction, with two traditional bottom-mounted fans and none of the “throughput” fan construction found in Nvidia’s FEs, and is not advertised with certain supercharged cooling options. Despite the lack of a smart fan construction, this model stays cool and quiet on stock clocks and never exceeds 65 ° C at full load.

Unfortunately for my test setup, however, I had to take the unusual step of unscrewing the mounting plate from the EVGA so it wouldn’t block my ability to place the GPU in my case. In my anecdotal case, this was the first time I’ve ever had to do this with a GPU I’ve reviewed or tested in my seven years at Ars (though admittedly, that was mostly with Nvidia’s and AMD’s stock models, as opposed to a wide range of OEMs).

Fortunately, I was still able to stably place the EVGA GPU in my machine for testing purposes, after which I started comparing it to the closest GPU I owned: the RTX 2060 Super, released in July 2019 for $ 399. That model was a much-needed upgrade to the lukewarm RTX 2060, and it came as an adequate option for gamers who wanted robust 1080p performance across the board, along with plenty of 1440p options. and a reasonable way to tiptoe into the worlds of ray tracing and Nvidia’s proprietary deep-learning super sampling (DLSS).

During my testing, I found that the “$ 70 cheaper” GPU (as priced in a magical, scalper-free market) generally landed neck and neck with the July 2019 card, rather than blowing away the older model. This seems to boil down to the give-and-take nature of the specification tables of the two cards. The RTX 3060 has more than 150 percent of the 2060 Super’s CUDA cores, along with 150 percent of the GDDR6 VRAM and a slight edge in core clocks. But its VRAM is definitely not the same type, downgraded from a 256-bit bus to a 192-bit bus with a lower memory bandwidth. In addition, it is difficult to compare each card’s own “RTX” potential by counting tensor cores and RT cores, as the RTX 3060 has fewer cores in both cases than the RTX 2060 Super, albeit “newer” generations of each. .

All of the above benchmarks were run on my standard Ars test rig, which has an i7-8700K CPU (overclocked to 4.6 GHz), 32 GB DDR4-3000 RAM, and a combination of a PCI-e 3.0 NVMe drive and standard SSDs.

My first question mark came when I saw the RTX 2060 Super beat the RTX 3060 in several 3DMark benchmarks. The older card had a performance lead of a whopping 6.5 percent in a simple GPU muscle test (“Fire Strike Ultra”), beating even the newer card, marginally, in a direct 3DMark ray-tracing showdown.

With this knowledge in hand, I grabbed an Nvidia benchmark chart provided to members of the press that matched most of my other tests – albeit with results a little more charitable for the newer RTX 3060 than mine. Where Nvidia found that The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 (ray tracing disabled) were “dead even” between the 3060 and the 2060 Super as tested in 4K resolution, my personal, repeatable benchmarks gave the older card an edge. Grand Theft Auto V., which runs just 2.9 percent faster on the 2060 Super in 4K, does not appear in the benchmark label provided by Nvidia.

But the rest of my tests showed that the RTX 3060 was generally at the forefront of gaming performance. Many of the best results came when a particular benchmark included ray-tracing effects, but even as a pure, old-school raster map, it often enjoyed a noticeable 9 percent lead over non-RT tests.