Introduction

Palit introduced its GeForce RTX 3060 Dual OC graphics card today. The RTX 3060 is the most important “Ampere” graphics card for NVIDIA, from a volume standpoint, as the xx60 series tends to sell the most to the vast majority of gamers. At a starting price of $329, the RTX 3060 is designed to be a logical upgrade for those still gaming on the GTX 1060 6 GB “Pascal,” or even those on the GTX 1660 Ti, bringing them 2nd generation RTX real-time raytracing technology.

The “Ampere” graphics architecture powering the Palit RTX 3060 Dual OC uses the 2nd generation of RTX technology, combining new Ampere CUDA cores with concurrent FP32+INT32 math performance, 2nd generation RT cores which double the intersection performance over the previous generation, and add 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 GeForce RTX 3060 is based on the new 8 nm “GA106” silicon, making its debut on the desktop platform. 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 has doubled the memory amount over the previous-generation RTX 2060, to 12 GB. The memory bus width and memory type, are unchanged—192-bit GDDR6, although the memory clock has been increased slightly to 15 Gbps.

The Palit GeForce RTX 3060 Dual OC is designed for those who just want an RTX 3060 for its gaming performance and features, at as low as possible pricing. It features an innovative dual-fan solution, in which most of the airflow from the second fan flows through the heatsink. Palit is giving the card a handy factory-overclock of 1867 MHz (vs. 1777 MHz reference). Palit does not give any guidance on pricing, we expect the card to be one of the most affordable models.