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 or for grandfather 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
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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 six
gig 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 teas 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
founder's 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 touring end bank 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 tens and 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 cuda grass for pascal though really is cs go
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 touring 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 specuperf
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 temperatures of
about 70 degrees throughout spec vue 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 a-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 360 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 want to 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
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credit so thanks for watching guys if you do want to 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