Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU could somehow end up pricier than the RTX 3060 Ti
Or at least a few models of the 3060 Ti, if leaks prove true
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060graphics card isout later this week on February 25, but we’ve just caught another glimpse of purported pricing – and it’s not great news on the affordability front.
It seems that RTX 3060 GPUs have arrived with retailers, unsurprisingly at this point, with Coreteks supplying images of a load of different boxed models at an unspecified US retail outlet (presumably one of the big players), all ready to go on sale – and doubtless be snapped up instantly.
The really interesting bit, however, isCoreteksalso provides what it believes to be the retail prices for some of these graphics cards. Remembering that the recommended price is $329 (around £235, AU$420) in the US, the supposed actual prices at this one retailer will be as follows:
So, as you can see, the cheapest model is $485, a whopping 47% more thanNvidia’s recommended price. Huge pinches of salt are required, naturally, and we certainly can’t take this as anything other than a potential indication of possible price hikes. (Also note that theMSIVentus X2 presumably refers to the Ventus 2X).
That said, sadly this fits with the price-related leakage we’ve seen in Europe as well, with retailers likeProShop hiking the price of the 3060 by 50%or even more.
Which as you may realize, leaves us in the situation where the RTX 3060 will actually be more expensive than the recommended price of the 3060 Ti. Or indeed even the real-world price of some Ti models – you can get an EVGA 3060 Ti for $460 at Best Buy, for example, which is cheaper than any of the above 3060 prices (but naturally, that 3060 Ti is out of stock – as are all models).
Taking stock
The RTX 3060 has 3,584 CUDA cores and a base clock of 1.32GHz, with a boost clock of 1.78GHz. It’ll come with 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM (due to the 192-bit memory interface).
Get the best Black Friday deals direct to your inbox, plus news, reviews, and more.
Sign up to be the first to know about unmissable Black Friday deals on top tech, plus get all your favorite TechRadar content.
Stock problems have plagued Nvidia’s Ampere graphics card since their launch, and that situation is expected to continue with a stampede for the RTX 3060 – particularly given that this is the most affordable RTX 3000 card yet released (although as we’ve seen, affordable is a relative term here).
Nvidia is doing some firefighting on the pricing front in terms of putting off crypto miners when it comes to the attractiveness of the newgraphics cardbydeliberately halving the hash rate of the RTX 3060– as well as launching dedicated mining GPUs.
That should mean that these cards are much more likely to end up in the PCs of keen gamers, rather than mining rigs, hopefully easing some of the massive demand issues.
That’s a welcome move, of course, but demand is very likely to be huge from gamers alone, so there’ll need to be a seriously fast flowing supply of RTX 3060 models – which isn’t likely to happen given whatNvidia and retailers have already said about production woes.
The danger is thatAmpereis already being talked about and viewed as a kind of ‘lost GPU generation’; a great product that literally isn’t being delivered, or at least not in much quantity. Nvidia needs to ensure that this isn’t how the RTX 3000 range goes down in history, and as we recently discussed, Team Green should go further than its anti-mining measures – with one possibility being pushing therelease of refreshed ‘Super’ RTX 3000 cards sooner rather than later.
ViaWccftech
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
Intel Battlemage rumored for December – could new budget GPUs win over gamers neglected by Nvidia and save the Arc brand?
Nvidia RTX 5090 Ti suddenly pops up – and RTX 6000 GPUs are mentioned in trademark filings too – but don’t get excited
Arcane season 2 finally gave us the huge Caitlyn and Vi moment we’ve been waiting for – and its creators say ‘we couldn’t have done it in season one’
