Well well well, just when we thought the GPU market couldn’t get any wilder, Nvidia kicks
down the door, slaps our chubby cheeks, and screams at us to wake the hell up and smell
the RTX 3060 roses.
That’s right, it’s RTX 3060 launch day, and it’s probably one of the weirdest GPU
launches in at least my recent memory. And because Nvidia decided to skip out on building
their own founders edition 3060 (not like I was going to get one anyway), in this video
we’ll be working with one of the most premium cards out there, namely ASUS’ ROG Strix
RTX 3060 Gaming.
But first, if you want to pick up any of the parts I’ll be mentioning in this video,
go ahead and use my Amazon affiliate links in the description down below – it costs
you nothing but supports the channel and the work I do here, or if you want to support
my work directly, I’ll also link my Patreon down there for you to check out.
Or if you’re in South Africa and want to pick up any new parts for your build, you’d
better do it at Wootware or you’re gonna have a bad time. Not a threat, just a warning.
Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that Nvidia’s Ampere lineup has been
a literal gamechanger. The GPUs we’ve seen so far has absolutely delivered on the massive
generational leap we’ve all been waiting for, so much so that everyone wants one, and
so most of us have no hope of actually being able to buy the friggin things, at least not
without draining our bank accounts.
But, regardless of whether you can actually get your hands on these things, they’re
fantastic, and the brand spanking new RTX 3060 should be no different.
The RTX 3060 is coming in as the champion of the average consumer, supposedly offering
unrivaled 1080p performance and beyond within its price class, at least until AMD decides
to reenter the conversation.
And that price class is supposed to start at $329. Unfortunately, because Nvidia’s
not making their own flavor of this particular GPU, we don’t know which card will actually
come in at that price, but it’s pretty safe to say that the cream of the crop Strix version
we have right here is going to be quite a bit pricier than that
Nvidia and their board partners are still keeping official pricing for all of the cards
under wraps until they actually go on sale, which shouldn’t be more than a couple of
hours after this video goes live, but when they do, I’ll add that info in the description.
Not that any of that pricing will really matter once all of those cards inevitably go out
of stock five minutes after launch, but it eeeeez what it eeeeez.
Anyway, regardless of the price you end up paying, here’s what you’ll be getting.
The RTX 3060 ships with 3,584 Cuda Cores, which is 1,280 fewer than the 3060 Ti, so
we’re definitely in for a sizeable performance difference here, but it should fill the gap
a tiny bit with a boost clock of 1.78 GHz, 110MHz more than the Ti version.
Arguably an even bigger difference or at least the most surprising difference between the
two comes down to memory. And that’s because the RTX 3060 ships with a massive 12GB of
GDDR6 memory… like what the hell?
To put that into perspective, both the RTX 3060 Ti and 3070 are equipped with 8GB of
GDDR6, while the flagship of the bunch, the 3080, ships with a now paltry 10GB, although
it switches things up for GDDR6X.
Of course, not all memory is created equal, and the 3060’s does feature a lower 192-bit
bus, but still. This is the current entry-level Ampere card, and it’s packing more memory
than the current flagship? What’s going on here?
As awesome as it is to see a card at this price point packing this much memory, I don’t
quite understand the reasoning here.
Is the production line for 12GB less strained so Nvidia can push out more of these cards
faster, hopefully, better fulfilling demand for these things? Is Nvidia banking on games
requiring that much VRAM sooner than expected, and if so, isn’t that a major slap in the
face to everyone who already bought a 3060 Ti, 3070, or even 3080? Wouldn’t more VRAM
make a heck of a lot more sense to include with cards built for higher resolutions?
And speaking of a slap to the face, is this a sign that Nvidia might be readying a nice
little Super refresh of the existing cards with the amount of memory they’re actually
supposed to have?
Heck, maybe Nvidia slapped 12GB of VRAM onto this thing to improve mining performance,
regardless of their somewhat transparent new stance against miners using gaming cards?
I have no idea, this is just an uneducated rant because I honestly don’t understand
why a card aimed at superb 1080p gaming needs this much VRAM while the rest didn’t get
the same treatment.
But, regardless of the reasoning here, as I said, this card having 12GB of VRAM is an
absolutely awesome thing to see.
Much like the Strix version we’re rocking here is an awesome thing to see.
This isn’t my first encounter with this generation’s ROG Strix cards. I’ve already
taken a look at the RTX 3070 Strix in a review which you can check out somewhere over here,
and the design they took with the 3060 is thankfully very similar to the 3070.
We’ve got the same overall, unapologetic gamer design language going on, as well as
a black, grey, and silver color scheme that just looks really badass and premium.
I’m an especially big fan of the brushed metal, or at least I think it’s metal, accent
pieces on the face of the card, along with the six protruding screws that add a whole
industrial vibe to the whole thing.
ROG decided to stick with a metal backplate for the card, which is very much appreciated
as there’s just no adequate substitute for cold, hard, metal, especially if it’s brushed.
It just looks and feels so damned good.
The Strix 3060’s backplate is the most noticeable departure from the 3070 version as far as
I can tell. The 3070 version has a much cleaner, more elegant design to it, with light gray
metal accents and the aforementioned screws on the right, and a subtle line pattern design
on the left.
Whereas the backplate on the 3060 takes a bit of a different turn, with a big ol’
ROG tag across the card, five cutouts exposing parts of the PCB, and two different styles
of anodized aluminum. It’s simultaneously more subdued than on the 3070, while also
somehow managing to look a little more intimidating.
By far my favorite feature of the backplate leads me perfectly to my favorite part of
these reviews, RGB baby!
On the back of the card is a relatively small RGB-illuminated ROG eye logo, but don’t
be fooled by its small size, as this thing gets more than bright enough to make up for
its size. All while still looking pretty classy, or at least as classy as RGB lighting can
be.
As much as I personally would’ve liked ROG to take it completely over the top and make
the logo even bigger, I can also see how that would’ve definitely been too much for most
people.
Speaking of too much, holy crap dat lightbar tho! Just like on the other Strix models of
this generation, the Strix 3060 again features an absolutely gargantuan lightbar on the side
of the card, one that’s interlaced with black stripes, almost like a zebra pattern.
When I first saw this on the 3070 version, I loved how massive, bright, and well-diffused
the lightbar was, but I wasn’t entirely sold on the striped pattern, and the same
more or less applies here, although having gotten used to it even more now, I’m definitely
starting to like it a lot more.
The lightbar on the 3060 does differ a little from the one on the 3070 though, with the
ROG eye logo built right into the strip itself on the 3060, allowing it to light up with
the rest of the light bar, which I actually think looks a little better than the triangular
cut out on the 3070.
With the Strix 3060 we also see the return of some subtle lighting on the fans, but it
doesn’t have nearly as much impact as the rest of the ensemble, so it doesn’t get
me especially excited.
Overall I think the card looks phenomenal, whether you want to turn the lights up for
a unique light show, or leave them off and just stare at the beautiful design that went
into the entire thing as a whole.
Luckily the card doesn’t just look good, it also feels good. As you might expect from
a Strix card, this thing feels remarkably solid.
Even though the shroud is mostly made out of high-quality plastics, and it is missing
the metal support bracket found on the higher-end 3000-series Strix cards, the high-quality
materials and metal backplate makes this thing feel like a quality piece of tech.
Cooling-wise, the card should be one of the best out there, featuring an almost 3-slot
thick heatsink complete with five heat pipes and a machine polished heat spreader, along
with three Axial-tech fans with alternating spin directions for reduced air turbulence
and reduced noise.
The card also has a fairly sizable cutout in the backplate, which has become commonplace
this generation, which should let cool airflow straight through the very end of the heatsink.
To wrap things up before we get into the benchmark gauntlet, the card also features premium alloy
chokes, capacitors, and a beefy power stage design, and even has a dual BIOS switch for
quiet and performance modes.
Now, let’s get into the numbers, shall we?
For testing I’ll be using AMD’s Ryzen 7 3800XT clocked at 4.5 GHz, an X570 Gaming
Pro Carbon motherboard, a 360mm AIO, a 32GB kit of Crucial’s Ballistix RGB clocked at
3600 MHz, Crucial’s P5 NVMe as our main system and game drive, along with Antec’s
EAG Pro 750W powering all the things.
And first up we’ll be taking a look at our 1080p results, which is where we see the 3060
falls immediately somewhere between its bigger brother the 3060 Ti, and the GTX 1080.
I would’ve loved to include results from last generation’s RTX 2060 Super, 2070,
and AMD’s 5700 XT in these benchmarks as that’s about where I think the 3060 might
compete more closely in terms of performance, but unfortunately, I don’t have access to
those cards right now.
That being said, Nvidia is marketing this card heavily for 1080p gaming, and I can definitely
see why. It absolutely mulches all of my usual benchmarks, posting more than 120 FPS in all
of the esports titles I tested (at much higher settings than you’d normally use to be competitive,
mind you), and had no trouble hitting and more often than not, surpassing 60 FPS in
even the most demanding of titles like AC: Valhalla and Cyberpunk.
When it comes to 1440p, the card is no slouch here either, sticking solidly to around 100FPS
in our esports titles, and holding its own relatively well in almost all of the super
graphically demanding AAA titles.
It does dip below 60 FPS in certain heavy hitter games, but at this resolution using
the high to max quality settings we were using, that’s pretty much to be expected.
This is definitely a 1440p, high-quality-capable card, but you might just have to tweak certain
graphical settings a little bit if you want a more solid experience.
Moving on to 4K, the numbers are about what you’d expect to see from a card in this
price class being forced to run at higher quality settings than it’s meant for. Those
numbers not being very impressive at all.
Most of the AAA games just proved too much for the card to handle at these settings,
posting numbers well below what I would personally ever play at or consider a “good” experience.
And while esports titles played well enough for the most part, frames win games, and at
4K you’re just not getting enough of them.
That’s not to say that the card can’t handle 4K at all, it’s just that if you’re
going to be running at 4K, you shouldn’t expect to do so at more than medium to low-quality
settings.
Last up is a round of benchmarks that is slowly becoming one of my favorites, that being ray
tracing and DLSS. Developers are really leaning into these features more and more, and when
you play Cyberpunk with RTX and DLSS on, you can see it starting to pay off in a big way.
I run my ray tracing benchmarks at 1440p as I find that to be a nice middle-ground for
higher and lower-end RTX 30-series cards, but in this case, the 3060 would’ve clearly
been more at home using Nvidia’s recommended 1080p.
The combination of 1440p, high to max quality settings, and all ray tracing settings maxed
out on top of all of that just isn’t a realistic scenario for the card to excel at. At least
not in combination with a balanced setting for Nvidia’s DLSS.
But even so the card performed admirably, being more than playable in three out of the
five titles I tested, and just barely playable in the other two.
I have no doubt that at 1080p using a performance-focused DLSS setting, even with high-quality settings,
and ray tracing set to the max, the card would provide a fantastic RTX experience, and at
this price point that’s an extremely exciting prospect.
Oh, and I’ve said it before, but Nvidia’s DLSS tech has improved by leaps and bounds
with these cards, so much so that I’d actually recommend turning it on regardless of whether
you want to play with RTX on or not – it’s all FPS gain, and almost zero noticeable quality
degradation.
And on the topic of quality, the Strix RTX 3060’s cooling quality is an easy S-tier.
With an ambient temp of 23 degrees and running under a heavy load, the card maxed out at
a very chilly 57 degrees, which is the lowest temp I’ve so far recorded for any of the
cards I’ve tested.
This is due in part to what I’d consider great thermal design, a less power-hungry
chip, but also due to fans ramping up a little higher than some of the other cards I tested,
maxing out at 64% or 1998 RPM.
Luckily, even with the slightly higher fan speed, the card was still almost silent with
case panels on, and barely any louder than the rest of my components with the side panels
off.
To wrap the numbers up, the card hit a max core clock of 1972 MHz, with an average clock
of 1821 MHz, and maxed out at a total board power draw under load of 175W.
All in all, the RTX 3060 GPU itself seems like an exceptionally good value, being not
only an amazing entry into the world of RTX, a fantastic performer for max 1080p, high-ish
1440p, and light 4K gaming, but also coming packed with a stupid amount of VRAM that makes
me as a 3070 owner more than a little jealous.
It’s also supposed to be priced much lower than any other GPU within its performance
class, and if we were in a world where you could actually buy them for their MSRP, or
in one where we could actually grab one before they go out of stock, I wouldn’t hesitate
to pick one up.
And if you are lucky enough, or fast enough to pick one up, the Strix should definitely
be near the top if not at the top of your list if you think it’s as sexy as I do,
want amazing cooling performance, and just generally like premium parts to go into your
build.
Just expect such a premium card to most likely command a price premium too.
Few, and that wraps it up for this one, folks.
Massive thanks to ASUS South Africa for letting me play around with this beast, and massive
thanks to everyone watching this.
If you liked the video, hit that button, get subscribed, and remember to buy any of the
parts I mentioned via my affiliate links down below, or if you’re in South Africa make
sure you grab them at the fantastic-est Wootware.
Anyway, best of luck to anyone hoping to pick one of these up, be sure to let me know if
you did.
Until then, cheers.