With a market struggling to regain normalcy after the crisis triggered by the pandemic, talking about graphics cards has become rather difficult; not so much as regards the technical aspect, but above all, because users are unable to find the new models of AMD and NVIDIA GPUs at prices close to those of the list or otherwise acceptable.
Without going any further - on when and to what extent the situation could normalize - the last few weeks have actually shown timid signs of recovery with prices that, at least for the cheaper solutions, have fallen significantly in the face of a much better availability than this. spring. The card we will test today is located in this market segment, the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 Gaming OC, a custom version of the NVIDIA RTX 3060 announced in February.
On paper, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 would be the ideal card for gamers, an excellent successor to the GeForce GTX 1060 and RTX 2060 which, statistics in hand, represent the most popular solutions among gamers looking for the best possible compromise between performance and price.
The improvements made by the NVIDIA Ampere architecture are also reflected in this model which, compared to the previous generation, offers a clear leap in performance in all areas, including compatibility with the latest NVIDIA standards and technologies.
Let's touch on the price issue immediately, if only to avoid unnecessary controversy about the usefulness of a card which, unfortunately, is still difficult to buy at the price list (if not in particular situations).
NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 3060 at 339 euros, a figure that in reality would have been "very indicative" even in a normal market situation; the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 Gaming OC variant should be in the $ 450/480 range (just over $ 400), but it is currently impossible to buy any of these cards for less than $600/650.
Objectively the situation is this, therefore, waiting for further signs of recovery, we just have to see what the custom model packaged by Gigabyte offers.
Technical Features
GeForce RTX 3060 uses an NVIDIA Amps GA106 from 3584 Cuda Core, a much more powerful chip than the old TU 106 (RTX 2060) but at the same time, presents a clear performance gap compared to the big sister GeForce RTX 3060 Ti ( Review).
In fact, the latter can count on the excellent Ampere GA104 GPU with a good 4,864 Cuda Core, which is 35% more processing units against a list price - we are talking about Founders Edition - equal to 425 euros (+ 25% approximately ). But let's see the technical characteristics of the RTX 3060 in detail:
Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 Gaming OC 12GB
| GeForce RTX 3070 FE | GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE | GeForce RTX 3060 FE | Gigabyte RTX 3060 Gaming OC | GeForce RTX 2060 | |
| Architecture | Ampere | Ampere | Ampere | Ampere | Turing |
| Processor | 8nm | 8nm | 8nm | 8nm | 12nm |
| Streaming Multiprocessor | 46 | 38 | 28 | 28 | 30 |
| Cores | 5.888 | 4864 | 3.584 | 3.584 | 1.920 |
| Memory | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 12 GB GDDR6 | 12 GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 |
| Bits | 256 bit | 256 bit | 192 bit | 192 bit | 192 bit |
| HDMI 2.1 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| TDP | 220W | 220W | 170W | 170W | 160W |
As we will see shortly in the benchmarks, the efficiency of the Ampere architecture compared to Turing is evident; just look at the different configurations of RT Core and Tensor Core - on paper in clear favor of the RTX 2060 - to realize the leap in performance offered by NVIDIA with the GeForce RTX 30 series. If this were not enough, the company also offers a serious update for the VRAM department that goes from the "canonical" 8GB to 12GB GDDR6 (15 Gbps).
Moving on to the Gigabyte RTX 3060 Gaming OC, this is one of the four options that the Taiwanese company offers for this precise NVIDIA model; the Gaming OC series is placed immediately below the AORUS products and is characterized by a high-performance dissipation system with higher clock rates than the Founders Edition.