Test: Gigabyte RTX 3060 Gaming OC

With the highest boost clock in the RTX 30XX series, the Gigabyte RTX 3060 Gaming OC delivers impressive performance at the right price.

The launch of the input model in the RTX30XX series has been delayed, but the waiting time is now over and we who waited have not done it in vain, because this is a very interesting card. The model we tested for this launch is based on Nvidia’s “press driver” who, due to a snow chaos in Texas, of all places, was delayed a couple of days. For our tests, we used a Z590 card with a tenth generation Intel Core i7-10700K processor and 16 gigahertz 4,400 MHz memories.

Quiet as a sniper

Gigabyte RTX 3060 Gaming OC is in many ways a very interesting card. Firstly, the card only takes up two expansion slots, which means that it fits in most chassis as long as there is barely 300 millimeters of space in terms of length. The card is powered by an eight-pin connector and requires a 550 watt PSU with its 170 watt TGP.

If we look at the card’s structure, we get a stable back plate with air passage in the back part, which helps to keep the card cool. In addition, there is a comprehensive fin-based passive flange payload that connects to the GPU and memory for fast heat transfer. Along the outside we find a full-coverage shield with triple specially designed fans with eleven blades, where the two outer fans rotate in an alternative direction from the middle fan, which creates less vibration, lower noise level and more efficient cooling.

ALSO READ – Test: Gigabyte RTX 3060TI Gaming OC Pro

Thanks to the card’s effective passive cooling, the fans will also be completely still until the card’s heat development requires active cooling. This gives us a card that for the most part is completely silent but which even under maximum load, in an approved insulated chassis, is quiet as a sniper at night.

On the connection side, we find dual Displayport, DP, and dual HDMI which are placed as every other device, ie DP, HDMI, DP and HDMI and as usual all ports can be used simultaneously for four monitors.

On the top of the card there is a small RGB integration in the form of “Gigabyte” with a light strip underneath (see picture above). This can of course be connected and controlled by the manufacturer’s RGB Fusion 2. It’s a shame that Gigabyte and many other manufacturers do not also add an RGB solution over the fan side, as more and more people choose to place their graphics cards in a vertical design.

Fast cores

We continue with the inside of the card where we find a base in RTX 3060 which is a GPU with 3,584 Cuda cores. This may not sound like much when we compare with the 3060Ti with 4,864 cores or 3080 with 8,704 cores, but to partially compensate for this, the RTX 3060’s cores run at a higher frequency which at a basic boost clock stays at 1,837 gigahertz which can be compared with 1.67 gigahertz for the 3060Ti. We should also remember that the card has almost 1.8 times more cores compared to the previous model 2060. If we then look at what this means in numbers, RTX 3060 performs 12.7 TFLOP’s shadow performance plus the RT cores’ raytracing of 24.9 TFLOP’s which gives a full 37.6 effective TFLOP’s which is huge performance.

the bandwidth increases from 18 Gigabit per second to 48, which is a huge boost

But what makes this card a little extra interesting and one reason why the drivers were a bit late, is that for the RTX 3060 we get a full 12 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory, an amount that only the top model 3090 can surpass. This also opens up new opportunities for memory-intensive games and applications. For this, the card uses HDMI 2.1, which is an update from HDMI 2.0b, which means that the bandwidth increases from 18 Gigabit per second to 48, which is a huge boost. It’s a bit of a shame that Nvidia has not chosen to keep its 256-bit memory bus from the Ti model, here we have to make do with 192-bit communication.

Cruel 1080 performance

We then come to what is perhaps most interesting, the card’s performance in games and more productive work. We ran our card during relatively short but intensive tests to get as broad a performance picture as possible. All games have been run in full HD resolution with both RT and DLSS activated if this was possible. The values ​​presented are also average FPS (frames per second) and without further overclocking of the card. We see here that the card performs an average of about 68 images per second, which is clearly good in terms of the expected price image.

Now more and more users are using their systems to both play and work, something that probably became even more important during the pandemic. For this reason, we briefly compiled a performance comparison between the previous model 2060 and Gigabyte’s RTX 3060 Gaming OC in four professional applications; Arnold, Blender, V-Ray and OctaneRender. The results here showed an average increase in performance of just over 57 percent, which is due to a combination of increased memory and the second generation Nvidia RTX architecture with improved and optimized raytracing and Tensor cores.

Learn to be even better in the future

As we mentioned above got a little late access to drivers and wanted the first tests ready at launch, we will get to come back with more detailed differences when using DLSS and RT, and how well the card works during overclocking. After only a couple of days of use, however, we can state that this may well be the most interesting card on the market in terms of performance and versatility per invested krona, a card that thanks to this will probably sit in many systems in the near future.

SPECIFICATIONS Gigabyte RTX 3060 Gaming OC

• Manufacturer: Gigabyte, www.gigabyte.com
• Approximate price: SEK 5,890 incl. VAT, SEK 4,712 excl. VAT
• GPU: RTX 3060
• Clock frequency: 1 837 MHz
• Cuda cores: 3 584
• Memory: 12 GB GDDR6
• Memory bus: 192 bit
• Memory bandwidth: 360 GB / s
• Interface: PCIe Gen 4
• Connections: 2 Displayport + 2 HDMI
• Power supply: 8 pins
• TGP: 170 watts
• Measure: 282 x 117 x 41 mm