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Colorful's Cute GeForce RTX 3060 Will Hit Shelves for $839
Colorful's iGame GeForce RTX 3060 bilibili E-sports Edition OC 12G graphics card sports a cooler very similar to what you might find on Nvidia's own Ampere Founders Edition cards. The graphics card won't come cheap; it's set to arrive at U.S. retailers for $839.
Checking in with a dual-slot design, the iGame GeForce RTX 3060 bilibili E-sports Edition OC 12G measures 300 mm long and features a vivid shroud with both Colorful and bilibili E-sports branding. There's RGB lighting surrounding the shroud's edge. The graphics card comes with a 6+2-phase power delivery sub-system and sips power through a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, which is located at the middle of the graphics card. It is rated for 170W, so a decent 550W power supply is more than sufficient.
The cooling system is reminiscent to the Founders Edition cooler on the GeForce RTX 3080 or RTX 3090. The cooler utilizes two white 90mm axial fans, one on each side of the shroud. The heat is transferred to the giant heatsink through four copper heat pipes that are 6mm in diameter. The backplate boasts a magnetic design, opening the door for easy customization. The graphics card offers three DisplayPort 1.4b outputs and one HDMI 2.1 port.
The iGame GeForce RTX 3060 bilibili E-sports Edition OC 12G runs with a 1,320 MHz base clock and 1,777 MHz boost clock, adhering to Nvidia's reference specifications for the GeForce RTX 3060. However, there's a tiny, black button at the rear of the graphics card that cranks the boost clock speed up to 1,822 MHz, a minuscule 2.5% improvement.
It's unknown if the iGame GeForce RTX 3060 bilibili E-sports Edition OC 12G will arrive with Nvidia's reworked Ethereum anti-mining limiter. Colorful only lists the graphics card with the GA106 die. Without more details, it's impossible to know for certain at this point.
Nvidia is rumored to deliver the revised Ampere silicon in May. It's plausible that the iGame GeForce RTX 3060 bilibili E-sports Edition OC 12G is still using the previous version of the GA106 die, depending on when Colorful started producing the graphics card. At $839 and with limited quantities, consumers shouldn't have to worry about cryptocurrency miners. Scalpers, however, are another case.
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Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
So now the AIB's are becoming scalpers, themselves?
There is no point in selling cards from the factory to distributors and retailers at low price so they can land on shelves at MSRP when either one is going to be dumping the cards on eBay for 2-3X the price. Chances are that Nvidia also bumped its own pricing on new orders and all AIBs will be raising prices on new stock as their previous batch contracts run out.
Whether you like it or not, prices of limited goods rising to balance out demand is the free market working as intended.
