Pre-NDA Zotac RTX 3060 Torn Down By Crypto-YouTuber

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How did they get their hands on one?

Zotax RTX 3060 Teardown
(Image credit: @harukaze5719)

Nvidia announced its RTX 3060 last month, later revealing that it was putting the brakes on Ethereum mining performance with this card. Simultaneously, Nvidia announced the professional ‘CMP’ mining GPUs.

However, within all this, CryptoLeo, a Russian YouTuber that specializes in cryptocurrency, showed that the GPU was still profitable to mine with — as long as you didn’t mine Ethereum. Now, the same guy is tearing down his sample of the Zotac RTX 3060 graphics card for your viewing pleasure.

The first thing that stands out to CryptoLeo in the teardown is that the GPU’s memory comes with thermal pads to aid with cooling. This is an absolute must in nowadays market as the memory can run very hot, especially when mining.

Not far into the teardown, after removing the cooler and cleaning the GPU die, it immediately becomes clear which GPU is sat at the heard of this graphics card: the GA106-300-A1 — again confirming that this is the same GPU as in the mobile RTX 3060, but cut down with slightly fewer cores for this desktop variant. Of course, its significantly higher clock rates enable desktop-class performance on the RTX 3060.

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Zotax RTX 3060 Teardown
(Image credit: @harukaze5719)

As spotted by @Harakuze5719, the PCB is identical to that of the Zotac RTX 3060 Ti Twin Edge. This isn’t a huge surprise as the two GPUs don’t differ in power requirements all too much, so why make yet another PCB model if the same design can be re-used? Power delivery for the GPU is handled by a 5-phase setup with two power phases cleaning up power for delivery to the vRAM.

No Big Surprises In This Teardown

All things considered, there are no huge surprises to be seen here — this is a midrange card with a midrange cooling solution, and PCB designs have shrunk enough to fit the GPU into a palm of a hand.

The RTX 3060 is set to hit shelves tomorrow at an MSRP of $329 – but we’ll be impressed if even one card trades hands for that price.

Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

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10 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Phaaze88
    Oh, Zotac...

    I'm not surprised that the nerf to the 3060 wouldn't actually stop the card from being snatched up by miners.
    TROLOLOLOL by Nvidia!
    Reply
  • blacknemesist
    Phaaze88 said:
    Oh, Zotac...

    I'm not surprised that the nerf to the 3060 wouldn't actually stop the card from being snatched up by miners.
    TROLOLOLOL by Nvidia!
    Nerf? As if Nvidia would ever stop catering to the highest bidder like some PSU brands do aswell. It is great to sell GPUs from 2 generations ago for absurd profit margins
    Reply
  • Phaaze88
    blacknemesist said:
    Nerf? As if Nvidia would ever stop catering to the highest bidder like some PSU brands do aswell. It is great to sell GPUs from 2 generations ago for absurd profit margins
    Nvidia doesn't see any of that money though? They got their money from the partners before shipping the dies to 'em.
    The pricing madness you see now? Nvidia doesn't get that. They're more than happy to sell more dies though.
    You should be angrier at the AIB/AICs, resellers, etc.

    A 1200USD RTX 3080? Nvidia doesn't get any extra profit from that. That profit went to the AIB or the reseller who'd already bought it cheaper.

    Besides, it would be in Nvidia's best interests to avoid what happened with Turing. The sales of those cards were not very good, which were caused by:
    -Price to performance Vs Pascal and competing Polaris cards was weak; many owners of 10 series and RX 500 cards held on to their still capable cards.
    -Mining gold rush crash. Many Pascal and Polaris cards were up for sale in the 2nd hand market for stupidly low prices. That got way more attention from folks on older hardware than whatever Turing was working with.

    You know what's going to happen should the mining gold rush crash again(it's inevitable) and the next gen of cards happens to be on its way in?
    They will not sell as many new dies during the production run, and as a company, that is not favorable.
    Me? I will never touch the 2nd hand market, but I understand that I'm an odd man out.
    Many will buy 2nd hand if the price is right, and if there's a sudden surge of RTX 30 cards available for cheap, PEOPLE GON' BUY DAT, to hell with RTX 40 or whatever the heck it'll be called.

    A company should want to sell as many new products as it can = more profits. Gpu mining harms this goal.
    I don't believe Nvidia likes the gpu miners either(too volatile) because of this, but I'm not sure there's really anything they can do about it.

    ASIC mining should become more affordable, and more - if not all - of the blockchains need to move from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, but thats like striking at a hornets nest, because that would likely cause the value of the already ASIC driven chains to fall, and certain folks sure as hell wouldn't like that.


    The game of balance is darn difficult; there's no making everyone happy regardless of what happens... I believe it's best to go with the method that satisfies the majority.
    Now, which one is that?
    Reply
  • MarsISwaiting
    Phaaze88 said:
    Nvidia doesn't see any of that money though? They got their money from the partners before shipping the dies to 'em.
    The pricing madness you see now? Nvidia doesn't get that.

    Thats why Nvidia should start selling online direct .
    Reply
  • Phaaze88
    MarsISwaiting said:
    Thats why Nvidia should start selling online direct .
    They actually WERE, but: https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-puts-a-hold-on-rtx-3080-and-rtx-3090-founders-edition-sales-from-its-webstore/They couldn't handle the heat, I guess?

    I'm currently watching Best Buy right now to see if I can snag a 3080 FE. Some people suspected that there will be other drops alongside the 3060's launch.
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    Phaaze88 said:
    I'm currently watching Best Buy right now to see if I can snag a 3080 FE. Some people suspected that there will be other drops alongside the 3060's launch.
    And they were right. Hope you got lucky. I was able to land a 3090 finally. After reward points, was barely over $1000 shipped.
    Reply
  • blacknemesist
    Phaaze88 said:
    Nvidia doesn't see any of that money though? They got their money from the partners before shipping the dies to 'em.
    The pricing madness you see now? Nvidia doesn't get that. They're more than happy to sell more dies though.

    So nvidia does not renegociate?

    Hold on then.
    Nvidia is not making bank.
    Nvidia is also not introducing ways to protect consumers(when mining dies again or is laws are passed so that virtual currency has literally no value the only consumers left will be gamers and designers of all trades).

    Is Nvidia the Capcom of GPUs?

    I dropped a great deal for a 3090 because I though the market would recover soon and didn't feel like buying just to resell, should have gone the easy route.
    The more they mine the faster they will kill the mining crap.

    If only AMD had a proper DLSS solution I could at least consider going for them, really tired of having vram limiting the visuals.
    Reply
  • Phaaze88
    spongiemaster said:
    And they were right. Hope you got lucky. I was able to land a 3090 finally. After reward points, was barely over $1000 shipped.
    F - Adding to Cart button refused to work. Well, that's new...
    If I did not make the mistake of removing it from my cart ~4 weeks ago when it got stuck there, I'd have had one by now...
    I'm still in the EVGA queue, so there's that... I'm not that desperate for a 3080, since these are the only 2 things I'm doing.

    @blacknemesist1)Renegotiate? Would that not increase the MSRP and cause the AIBs to increase the prices of their models more?
    Prices would be even dumber than they are now.

    2)Oh NO, Nvidia's making bank alright: silicon, board design, as well as licensing fees. AIBs are still getting the short stick, though.
    Did you notice none of the AIBs have a Reference design this time around?
    That FE board must've been hella expensive for all of them to be like, "Yeah, we're gonna roll with the usual."

    3)No idea what Capcom of Gpus means...

    4)I'm looking forward to see how many 3090 gamers end up replacing it before they really make use of 24GBs of Vram.
    Nvidia can say what they want, but that thing is a Titan card, though and though.
    I know it's a halo card, but this is still one of the worst ones in history.

    5)Mining isn't going to die anytime soon, especially if people with money and resources stand behind it.
    Some kind of regulation is the next best thing - it can't/shouldn't be allowed to run rampant.

    6)DLSS, while a great feature, is too limited in compatibility in its current state. Nvidia needs to do more to expand it.
    I'm not big on AAA titles at all, so that and RT are darn near worthless to me.

    7)Vram has never really been a problem, it only looks that way because people have artificially made it look that way.
    Developers do need to optimize their programs better, but they have it rough too, like:
    -all too often, they don't have enough time to polish their games.
    -the publishers wanting to recycle the same old crap(cheaper for them to do so), all while milking people of more money through MTX, of which only the upper ceiling sees.
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    Phaaze88 said:
    F - Adding to Cart button refused to work. Well, that's new...
    If I did not make the mistake of removing it from my cart ~4 weeks ago when it got stuck there, I'd have had one by now...
    I'm still in the EVGA queue, so there's that... I'm not that desperate for a 3080, since these are the only 2 things I'm doing.

    Best Buy has some anti-both thing where you have to add the product to your cart twice. The first time you click add to cart, it goes grey. Then you have to sit there and wait until it goes yellow and says add to cart again allowing you to click the button again and go through the purchase process

    @blacknemesist4)I'm looking forward to see how many 3090 gamers end up replacing it before they really make use of 24GBs of Vram.
    Nvidia can say what they want, but that thing is a Titan card, though and though.
    I know it's a halo card, but this is still one of the worst ones in history.
    All of them. Games aren't going to need 24GB for years. In order to maximize memory bandwidth, Nvidia has to use multiples of 12 chips. Since 2GB GDDR6X chips weren't available yet, the choice was 12 one GB chips, are 24 one GB chips. I'm sure Nvidia had some idea AMD was going to offer more than 12GB on their 6000 GPU's, so trying to justify $1500 for a 12GB halo card would have been difficult from a marketing standpoint.
    Reply
  • blacknemesist
    Phaaze88 said:
    F - Adding to Cart button refused to work. Well, that's new...
    If I did not make the mistake of removing it from my cart ~4 weeks ago when it got stuck there, I'd have had one by now...
    I'm still in the EVGA queue, so there's that... I'm not that desperate for a 3080, since these are the only 2 things I'm doing.

    @blacknemesist1)Renegotiate? Would that not increase the MSRP and cause the AIBs to increase the prices of their models more?
    Prices would be even dumber than they are now.

    2)Oh NO, Nvidia's making bank alright: silicon, board design, as well as licensing fees. AIBs are still getting the short stick, though.
    Did you notice none of the AIBs have a Reference design this time around?
    That FE board must've been hella expensive for all of them to be like, "Yeah, we're gonna roll with the usual."

    3)No idea what Capcom of Gpus means...

    4)I'm looking forward to see how many 3090 gamers end up replacing it before they really make use of 24GBs of Vram.
    Nvidia can say what they want, but that thing is a Titan card, though and though.
    I know it's a halo card, but this is still one of the worst ones in history.

    5)Mining isn't going to die anytime soon, especially if people with money and resources stand behind it.
    Some kind of regulation is the next best thing - it can't/shouldn't be allowed to run rampant.

    6)DLSS, while a great feature, is too limited in compatibility in its current state. Nvidia needs to do more to expand it.
    I'm not big on AAA titles at all, so that and RT are darn near worthless to me.

    7)Vram has never really been a problem, it only looks that way because people have artificially made it look that way.
    Developers do need to optimize their programs better, but they have it rough too, like:
    -all too often, they don't have enough time to polish their games.
    -the publishers wanting to recycle the same old crap(cheaper for them to do so), all while milking people of more money through MTX, of which only the upper ceiling sees.

    I was talking as in the best interests of nvidia. If AIB are taking a gigantic cut then nvidia would just take part of it so both would profit the same. As a consumer I don't want this to happen, it is worst case scenario.
    No sure what you mean. For me it seems AIB just took the 2xxx series design and slapped it on the 3xxx as much as possible. The FE design is quite pretty this time around.
    Capcom has an habit of not making easy money out of easy things the community wants, literally passing on a fortune time and time again
    The 3090 is the better choice considering the price. Not so long ago I could have gotten an MSI Suprim X 3090 for 1744 euros while the 3080 were going for 1300 euros plus. The extra Vram is a nice to have, my 2080 is always capped at full usage so much that I have to drop textures down and yet still sit pretty at over 100fps. I would rather trade those 40 fps above 60 for better quality on many games that do not need high fps.
    Mining is becoming more and more expensive to mine due to the value of eth and bc dropping so it is already starting, hopefully the expenses keep pillling up till is no longer profitable. If they want to mine fine but that is a complete new market and gpus design for gaming/3D works should not be in their hands. nvidia will launch 4 mining specific gpus the best going for about the same rate of mining as a 3080 but I didn't see any info on price. that will aliviate the market abit.
    DLSS is part of the directx12 and is being implemented in many games due to how easy it is but make work apparently. Many people care about DLSS mostly because it is a way to make the lifespan longer and play on settings you would never be able to achieve at a very small costs in visuals.
    I completely agree on this. MTX have soiled the reputation of the companies who abuse them and even harmless MTX are now frown upon. Also poor console to PC ports.
    Here's hoping for better days and bitter karma for scalpers.
    Reply