Graphics cards/NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060
NVIDIA · GeForce RTX 30 · Desktop
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 is NVIDIA’s Ampere (GA106-300) desktop graphics card with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, 3,584 shading units and a boost clock of 1777 MHz.
Photo: Qurren · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Overview
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 is NVIDIA’s Ampere (GA106-300) desktop graphics card with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, 3,584 shading units and a boost clock of 1777 MHz. These are the manufacturer’s published figures. They describe what the chip is designed to do, not what your particular machine does with it, and the gap between those two is usually cooling. A boost clock is a ceiling rather than a promise, and how long a graphics card holds it under continuous load is the one thing no specification sheet can tell you.
Specifications
- Architecture
- Ampere (GA106-300)
- Shading units
- 3,584
- Base clock
- 1320 MHz
- Boost clock
- 1777 MHz
- Memory
- 12 GB
- Memory type
- GDDR6
- Memory bus
- 192-bit
- TDP
- 170 W
- Process
- 8 nm
- Launched
- 2021-02-25
Comparable within an architecture. Across vendors or generations it is not a like-for-like count.
Board power, not measured draw. A laptop GPU's power is a range the laptop maker chooses within.
Sources
Each figure, the label its source printed beside it, and the day it was read.
| Figure | As printed | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shading units3,584 | NVIDIA CUDA Coresunder GeForce RTX 3060 | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Base clock1320 MHz | Base Clock (GHz)under GeForce RTX 3060 | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Boost clock1777 MHz | Boost Clock (GHz)under GeForce RTX 3060 | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Memory12 GB | Standard Memory Configunder GeForce RTX 3060 | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Memory typeGDDR6 | Standard Memory Configunder GeForce RTX 3060 | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Memory bus192-bit | Memory Interface Widthunder GeForce RTX 3060 | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| TDP170 W | Graphics Card Power (W)under GeForce RTX 3060 | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Launched2021-02-25 | The GeForce RTX 3060 is out today | nvidia.comLaunch release |
Architecture, Process: recorded from en.wikipedia.org before each figure carried its own source. The maker's page does not print them in this form, so they do not count as verified.
Measured on SystemCheck: not enough runs yet. Run the test to add yours.
Compare
The 6 nearest graphics cards in the same segment, each with a published side-by-side.
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 10GB
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 vs AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 vs Intel Arc B580
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 vs AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 12GB
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
Other graphics cards in NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30
What these numbers mean
Every figure on this sheet is a design target. None of it is a measurement.
Nothing above describes how a graphics card behaves twenty minutes into a sustained workload, which is where two chips with nearly identical specifications routinely diverge. A boost clock is a ceiling the vendor permits, not a rate the chip sustains, and whether it holds depends on the cooling, the case, the power profile and the room. None of those appear on a specification sheet.
We deliberately do not reduce these figures to a single score. A composite invented from specifications would look authoritative and measure nothing, and choosing the weights would be choosing the winner.