 You don't know what this GPU's been through to get here, nor do you know how many of them didn't make it. But, here it is. The GeForce RTX 3060, Nvidia's long-awaited premium mid-range Ampere architecture GPU. This, this is the one that's destined to top Steam's charts for the most popular gaming card on the freaking planet for at least as long as its forefather, foregrandfather, the GTX 1060 did. But that assumes a couple of things, doesn't it? One, that it's actually any good, and of course number two, that Nvidia can make enough of them. One thing we can always make enough of though is smooth segues to our sponsors. X-Team provides high-performing teams of developers to some of the world's leading brands. Join X-Team and become part of an energizing community for developers at the link in the video description. It's hard to believe that the GTX 1060 is nearly five years old at this point. That's how long it's been since anything has even come close to the level of bang for the buck that this card represented. It beat out the contemporary Polaris-based RX 480 and AMD's, hey, at least you tried RX 580 refresh, then Nvidia themselves tried to make the magic lightning strike again. First with the RTX 2060, then with their GTX 1600 series. I mean, those are both good products, don't get me wrong, but the 1060 is still the top dog on Steam's hardware survey so it's clear that mid-range gamers were hungry for something better. That's why so much is riding on the RTX 3060. Nvidia is explicitly targeting you, the nearly 10% of you out there who are watching this on a 1060 and spoiler alert, this is it. This is going to be the GPU to finally topple it. At least that's what I would say if the replacement were coming in at the same price point. While the 329 US price tag does make sense next to the GTX 1060 6G founders edition at 299, at least after we adjust for inflation, there is no founders edition this time around, just a reference design. So you are definitely still paying an RTX tax. This may give AMD an in with their tease there of what is almost certainly their RX 6700 series. Get subscribed by the way, so you don't miss our coverage of those cards when they launch. Unlike the RTX 3060 Ti, which does have a founders edition, the RTX 3060 comes with 50% more GDDR6 memory, but that's constrained to a slower 192-bit bus. As for its faster clocked CUDA cores, well, they're faster clocked, but they've been cut to just shy of three quarters of its Ti sibling. Compared to the GTX 1060 though, the RTX 3060 gets all the goodies that come with Nvidia's latest Ampere architecture, like ray tracing, HDMI 2.1 for up to 4K 120 Hertz displays, Nvidia broadcast, and the Turing Nvenc engine that's just so good for streaming. That means that as long as performance is good, the extra ask from Nvidia is likely to be more than worth it. So then here's our GPU bench and here's the cards we'll be comparing against. We wish there were more, but we really didn't have a lot of time. We got this via very unconventional means because our other ones were stuck, that thing we said before. Starting with Shadow of the Tomb Raider then, it's no surprise that in traditional rasterization, the GTX 1060 falls way behind the new RTX 3060. What is a little surprising, and this could be good news for you, is that the RTX 2060 Super comes so close. So if you did shell out for last generation, well, you shouldn't feel too compelled to upgrade here. Back to those who didn't though, well, this might finally be it, the card that makes RTX mainstream. I mean, check this out. With RTX on, the 3060 manages higher performance numbers at 1080p than the GTX 1060 gets with RTX off. As for the 1060 with RTX on, well, we tried it, but it crashed out due to a display driver reset that nearly took the rest of the PC with it. F1 2020 sees the 3060 pulling further ahead of the RTX 2060 Super with a total improvement entering the high 20% before dipping back down to the low 10s in Forza Horizon 4. As for the GTX 1060, well, it struggled to maintain a frame rate much higher than 60. Then there's Wolfenstein Youngblood. Youngblood is a highly optimized Vulcan title, and it shows in how much of a performance chasm there is between the GTX 1060 and the rest of the pack. And the 1060 straight up refuses to even run Vulcan ray tracing since non-RTX cards rely on the DirectX 12 fallback layer. As for Microsoft Flight Simulator, it's basically unplayable on the GTX 1060 unless you're willing to reduce the graphics quality. And remember guys, this is at 1080p, so you can't exactly just keep dropping down the res and still have a great experience. The coup de grace for Pascal though, really is CSGO performance. And you might look at these numbers and think, what's the problem? But Nvidia's frames win games motto isn't for nothing. The faster a frame can be rendered and pushed to your display, the more up to date the information that hits your eyes is going to be. And for a game like CSGO, especially in a competitive match, that makes a big difference. So the rule of thumb then, is that you want minimum frame rates that are no lower than double the refresh rate of your display. That gives you optimal frame pacing and input lag. So on a 60 Hertz display, hey, you're good to go with this. Don't even worry about it. 187 FPS minimum, no problem. As soon as you upgrade to a 120 Hertz display though, which is surprisingly affordable, you are not gonna be doing so hot. If you're cold by the way, try this sweater from lttstore.com. It's very warm. Moving on to productivity. The GTX 1060 has an obvious disadvantage going in lacking both the Turing and Ampere generational performance improvements. Even knowing that though, it is staggering to see just how badly it gets beaten here. The RTX 3060 manages to significantly outpace the last gen RTX 2060 Super, let alone the geriatric 1060, where that card's rendering performance can charitably be described as adequate if you don't value your time. The RTX 3060 easily doubles, even the 2060 Super scores across the board up until we hit Octane bench where the gap does narrow. But then interestingly, the RTX 3060 Ti widens its lead. Specview perf meanwhile, looks like it's largely a tie between the RTX 3060 and the 2060 Super with a few wins here and there, but nothing mind blowing. It's worth mentioning that the RTX 3060's narrower 192-bit memory bus puts it at a disadvantage in some of these tests, but it still keeps well ahead of the 1060 thanks to its higher speed GDDR6 and everything else that's better about it. As for our particular variant, we were supposed to have an EVGA card, then an ASUS one, then a different EVGA one. We ended up with an MSI Ventus 2X. It's got a pretty modest cooler compared to some of the top-end variants of RTX 3060, but even this card peaked at temperature of about 70 degrees throughout Specview perf with a very similar cooling and noise profile to not only the RTX 3060 Ti, but also the 2060 Super and even GTX 1060. And all of this was while maintaining roughly our card's maximum boost clock of 1.9 gigahertz, which suggests that this GPU has significant thermal headroom and may be able to be pushed much harder with the right board and cooler. With an 8-pin PCI Express power connector, it goes without saying that the RTX 3060 draws more power than the 6-pin GTX 1060, and this is reflected in its official power rating. At peak, it drew a cool 40 watts less, though, than the more powerful RTX 3060 Ti with a peak of just over 160 watts. That's good, but what's more impressive is that it drew less power than even the RTX 2060 Super, which peaked at over 175 watts. While the older GTX 1060 certainly did manage lower power consumption on average, though, it actually manages to spike to around the same maximum. So RTX 3060 is looking pretty darn good as far as thermals and power consumption. I mean, overall, there's very little to complain about in terms of performance. It's just that, and this is at risk of beating a dead horse here, availability may be a different issue. Now it is possible that these cards will be more widely available than previous RTX 30 series launches, but while Nvidia seemed confident that there would be lots of supply, a couple of retailers that we've spoken to locally have some doubts about that, at least out of the gate. So if that's true, today could be yet another payday for filthy scalpers. We can only hope then that supply is good enough that demand falls and those scalpers end up with a whole bunch of extra cards they have to liquidate into actual gamers as quickly as possible. Now you might have noticed that one thing we didn't talk about today is mining. And the reason for that is that we've set our piece on it already, and we only wanna evaluate this product from a gaming perspective on its merits for gamers, not the political decisions that Nvidia makes. So whatever we said before, it's important for you guys to know, we don't hate Nvidia and we definitely don't hate this product. It's just that when any company makes a boneheaded decision, Apple, Dell, Intel, AMD, doesn't matter who, it's our job to call them out. And then by the same token, it's our job to praise them when they get something right. And they got a lot right with the RTX 3060. So that's it. Go upgrade your GTX 1060 or your RX 580. Guys, it's time. Just like it's time to tell you about our sponsor, Ting. Thanks to Ting Mobile for sponsoring today's video. Their new rates make it easier than ever to see how much you can save by switching. They've got unlimited talk and text for 10 bucks, data plans starting at just $15 and unlimited data for $45. If you liked their previous pay for what you use plans, guess what? They're still there. They're just called Ting Flex plans now and they charge just $5 per gig. What's really cool is that data can even be shared if you have a family plan. So you can connect more phones to save even more. You get the same nationwide coverage in the US and award-winning customer service and pretty much any phone will work with Ting. So go check them out at linus.ting.com and get $25 in credit. So thanks for watching, guys. If you do wanna know more about the mining angle of this, go check out our recent video exploring why we think Nvidia limiting this card's hash rate and introducing dedicated mining GPUs is not as good as it might seem on the surface. It's a little more complicated than you might think.