Nvidia officially announced its upcoming GeForce RTX 3060 12GB graphics card today, which won't go on sale until late February. That hasn't stopped Nvidia's partners from revealing a variety of models, and Asus is joining us for a livestream on the Tom's Hardware YouTube and Facebook at 1pm PST, 4pm EST today to talk about its upcoming GPUs and show off some of the designs. Join us live, and you can ask questions during the show.
Getting over to the products announced today, Asus has six different models planned right now, and more may come in the future. All share the same basic specs of 12GB GDDR6 memory and the RTX 3060 GPU, though clock speeds, video ports and particularly the cooler design vary. For each of the product families, Asus offers a standard edition and an overclocked OC edition.
At the top of the stack is the ROG Strix, with plenty of RGB lighting and a triple fan cooler. It also has two HDMI 2.1 ports and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs. Asus hasn't revealed clock speeds yet, but it's a safe bet the Strix will be the highest clocked option. The card sports a 2.7-slot thick cooler, and there's a metal backplate with an airflow cutout at the back of the card. It also has a dual BIOS switch, allowing you to easily change between quiet and performance operating modes.
One step down from the Strix is the TUF Gaming OC model, which looks very similar in many aspects to the Strix, but without a lot of the RGB lighting. It still has the same port configuration (2 HDMI 2.1 ports and 3 DP1.4a) and triple fans and looks to be 2.7-slots wide as well, but it probably comes clocked slightly lower.
If you're after a more compact design, the Asus Dual cards drop down to a dual-fan arrangement and feature a 2-slot design, with a single HDMI 2.1 port and triple DP 1.4a connections. The Dual family also skips the dual BIOS configuration and only features a very small strip of RGB lighting on the front of the card. While performance and temperatures won't be quite as high as the TUF and Strix models, if you're after an affordable alternative, these should be great options.
All of the Asus cards feature a single 8-pin power connector, and while Nvidia and Asus haven't publicly released official TDP information, word on the street is that RTX 3060 will be a 170W part. (The RTX 3060 Ti by comparison is a 200W part.) Based on specs, we anticipate the RTX 3060 will be around 15% slower than the 3060 Ti, but because it has 12GB of VRAM, there may be occasions where the gap is less than that.
Of course the big question is whether supply can possibly hope to meet demand. Based on the current market situations, that seems highly unlikely, but we'd love to be surprised. It's virtually impossible to find a decent price on the best graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD, including various RTX 30-series graphics cards, though setting up notifications can help. Basically the top third or more of the GPU benchmarks hierarchy is either sold out or overpriced. We do know a few people that have managed to purchase cards, but patience is still very much required.
If you have other questions you'd like to ask Asus, hop on the livestream above and fire away.
