Overall and Final Verdict
The RTX 3060 was announced all the way back at CES this year and while the excitement for card launches has worn off a lot due to availability across the board being so bad the RTX 3060 is still a big launch in my opinion. It signifies Nvidia finally getting down into the always popular xx60 variation of the new ampere architecture. This is especially important as I talked about earlier because of just how popular the GTX 1060 and even to a lesser extent the RTX 2060 were and with both reaching ages that people are actively looking for an upgrade. This is the future for a lot of mid-range builds, so its performance at 1080p and to a lesser extent at 1440p is very important. Thankfully performance in both was great in all of my testing, 1080p is ready for high refresh rate monitors, even with modern more demanding games and in those same games if you plan on playing at 1440p everything is going to be smooth and playable. As far as comparisons with past GPUs, on the AMD side, the 3060 outperformed or ran with the RX 5700 XT, and for Nvidia, this card was extremely close in performance in a lot of tests with the RTX 2060 SUPER. It is around a 14% increase over the original RTX 2060 and isn’t a world breaking jump in performance. But if you are still living with the GTX 1060 five years later you will see a jump of 115% (both in Time Spy) which is HUGE. That’s really where the 3060 stands out. Now if you upgraded around the 2060 SUPER or later, this isn’t going to be the upgrade for you.
As for the EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black specifically, I am loving the compact dual fan design. It doesn’t quite reach the ITX form factor that I would love to see it be which would be at 170mm, but it is close at 201.8mm. With a true dual slot width and no extra height, it is perfect for a lot of SFF builds. I also dig the simple all blacked out styling, though the non-black version which should have a small overclock and a backplate would be a nice step up. The dual-fan design also translated to it being quieter than I expected in my testing.
The XC Black with its stock clock speeds is also designed to sell for Nvidia announced MSRP of $329 which I did confirm that it will be sold at that. Sadly, given current times we also know that most cards won’t sell anywhere near that. Currently, there are 100% zero cards available when you hit up retailers like Newegg, and until that changes people are going to get abused with higher prices. Hopefully, that starts to calm down. Once it does, the $329 price point is a solid one. What they sell for outside of EVGA directly (which I highly recommend btw) remains to be seen. Today's launch reviews come out at 9 AM EST and there is just a small 3-hour window between reviews and card availability. So we will find out at that time.
Live Pricing: HERE
