It’s time to set your alarms, folks, as Nvidia has confirmed that the RTX 3060 will definitely come out on Thursday, February 25, suggesting that previous rumors about its release date were, in fact, about money. The £ 299 / $ 329 graphics card is set to become the cheapest lightning-capable graphics card in Nvidia’s next generation line so far, and will likely sell extremely fast, as will the rest of the RTX family 30 from Nvidia.
Unlike previous releases, it looks like the RTX 3060 will go on sale a little later than previous RTX 30 cards. According to The Verge, retailers will be opening orders for the RTX 3060 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 5 pm GMT on February 25th, so be sure to set a reminder if you want to try choosing one.
The RTX 3060 will be the fifth GPU in the RTX 30 series that Nvidia has launched in recent months and, judging by the performance of its slightly more powerful brother, the RTX 3060 Ti, will probably be a great replacement for anyone with an aging GTX 1060 card In fact, the most attractive thing about the RTX 3060 is its 12 GB of VRAM GDDR6, which is actually 4 GB more than you get on the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070. The RTX 3060 does not have as many CUDA cores as the RTX 3060 Ti, and its clock speeds are also not that fast, but I’ll be intrigued to see how much it accumulates once I get an evaluation sample.
Unlike previous releases of the RTX 30, there will be no Nvidia Founders Edition of the RTX 3060 on sale on February 25th, so you’ll have to look for one of the many third-party cards that will be available from companies like Asus, Zotac, Gigabyte, Palit and MSI, to name just a few. As such, prices can vary substantially from Nvidia’s initial starting point of £ 299 / $ 329, depending on how much they overclocked from the factory or how sophisticated their cooling devices are – as is often the case with third-party cards.
It is not yet clear how many RTX 3060s will, in fact, be available at Nvidia’s starting price at the moment, as UK retailers have not yet listed what they will have in stock – although if the stock situation is similar to that of Nvidia In the previous launches of the RTX 30 (that is, almost nonexistent), prices should only increase more and more as demand increases. In fact, the Asus TUF GeForce RTX 3080 OC that I reviewed at the end of last year, when the RTX 3080 launched, cost £ 680 at launch, but now retailers are listing it for £ 900 – which is quite a markup. Hopefully, RTX 3060 prices will not go up quite so high but the fingers crossed there will be at least some cards available for the initial price for more than five minutes.