Introduction

We have with us the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC, the company's premium custom-design offering based on the new GeForce RTX 3060 "Ampere" graphics card. The RTX 3060 will go down as arguably the most important SKU for NVIDIA from this generation, as the xx60 SKU tends to sit at the top of the volume bell-curve with the high-end to its right and entry-level to the left. NVIDIA has had great success in targeting this so-called "sweetspot" market-segment dating all the way back to the 9600 GT. The new RTX 3060 is designed to be the perfect upgrade option for those still gaming on the GTX 1060 6 GB "Pascal," with a starting price of $329, which will hopefully hold as NVIDIA claims to have designed the chip to be slow at crypto-mining. We'll have to see how that works out.



The new GeForce "Ampere" architecture powering the RTX 3060 marks the 2nd generation of RTX technology, which combines new Ampere CUDA cores with concurrent FP32+INT32 math performance, 2nd generation RT cores which double the intersection performance over the previous generation, hardware for raytraced motion-blur effects, and 3rd generation Tensor cores that leverage the sparsity phenomenon in neural nets to increase AI inference performance significantly.

The RTX 3060 is based on the new 8 nm "GA106" silicon making its debut on the desktop platform, the smallest "Ampere" chip launched so far. The RTX 3060 comes with 3,584 Ampere CUDA cores, 112 3rd generation Tensor cores, 28 Ampere RT cores, 112 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. NVIDIA sweetens the deal by doubling the memory amount over the RTX 2060, up to 12 GB. The memory bus width and memory type are unchanged—192-bit GDDR6. The memory clock has been increased slightly to 15 Gbps.

The EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC is designed as a compact card that offers all the features of the RTX 3060 and Ampere architecture without going overboard in terms of cooling or bling. It will fit into most desktop towers and only needs one power connector. EVGA has still managed to pull off its unique flow-through PCB, which lets airflow from one of the two fans flow right through. There's also a factory overclock to be had, which runs the card at 1882 MHz (vs. 1777 MHz reference). EVGA is pricing the card at $390. In this review, we take it for a spin.