At the end of January, for example, Videocardz allegedly obtained Nvidia’s embargo schedule for the RTX 3060, which stated that press and influencers would start receiving review samples on February 19th. The schedule didn’t list when the embargo for reviews would eventually lift, nor did it reveal an exact release date for the RTX 3060, but if the sample seed date does indeed prove to be true, then it would seem likely that a worldwide release date of Thursday February 25th is probably about right. The RTX 3070, RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 all launched on Thursdays at the end of last year, after all, and it’s not unusual to only have a week of testing before the card eventually goes on sale. The only exception to this rule was the RTX 3060 Ti, which launched on December 2nd - a Wednesday. As such, there’s still a possibility that February 25th isn’t the correct release date after all - although given we’re almost halfway through February already and I’ve heard neither hide nor hair of when review samples are arriving yet, a more general window somewhere between Monday February 22nd and Friday February 26th seems all but certain. Of course, given how quickly the rest of Nvidia’s RTX 30 family got snapped up at launch, we can probably also expect stock levels of the RTX 3060 to last all of 20 seconds before it, too, disappears in a puff of smoke for the next several months, but I will, of course, let you know its proper on sale date as soon as Nvidia get round to announcing it. The RTX 3060 is set to be the cheapest RTX 30 card yet out of Nvidia’s next-gen Ampere family of ray tracing GPUs, with prices starting at £299 / $329. It will come with 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM (which is actually more than the 8GB you get on the more powerful RTX 3060 Ti on RTX 3070), 3584 CUDA cores (down from the 4864 on the RTX 3060 Ti), and a base clock speed of 1320MHz (also down from the 1410MHz on the Ti). Unlike the rest of Nvidia’s RTX 30 family, though, there will be no Founders Edition of the RTX 3060 available when it eventually launches - so you’ll have to pick from one of the many third party models that will be going to on sale if you decide to try and get one.
