According to a report from PC Gamer, Nvidia's new RTX 2060 12GB will be difficult to find on store shelves throughout early and mid-December. PC Gamer cites a statement that proclaims 2060 12GB production will begin to "ramp starting around the end of December through January." While it might not be one of the best graphics cards, given the GPU is three years old now, it's still better than nothing.
Unfortunately, we're probably looking at mass availability beginning sometime after the New Year, though it is currently unclear if we'll even see those cards made available to gamers through retailers in the US — a current search turns up zero of the cards on eBay, for example, and we didn't see any listed at Newegg, Amazon, or other US retailers in the past day. This certainly isn't what people really want to hear, especially if they're trying to find a new graphics card for the holidays. Even stranger, Nvidia and its AIB partners haven't even released an official MSRP for the RTX 2060 12GB.
The most Nvidia has given on the matter is a statement that the RTX 2060 12GB is a "premium" version of the 6GB model and that pricing will reflect that. In fact, Nvidia has said that pricing will vary depending on card model and region, so it appears the company never intended to have a reference MSRP for the 12GB version.
Nvidia's statement about the RTX 2060 12GB being a premium card seems to be backed up by its AIB partners' strategy of focusing RTX 2060 12GB sales on miners instead of gamers. In our coverage, we noted that it makes no sense at all for the RTX 2060 12GB to be a mining card; it simply doesn't have the memory bandwidth (not to be confused with capacity) to mine Ethereum at higher hashrates than existing cards from both Nvidia and AMD — it's basically GTX 1660 Super levels of GPU mining performance. There are also rumblings of an incoming RTX 3050 in January which would logically occupy a similar spot on our GPU benchmarks hierarchy.
Overall, the RTX 2060 12GB appears to be a very confusing card in Nvidia's lineup of graphics cards. Due to how Nvidia is releasing the 2060 12GB as a premium 2060 card and its focus on miners, it could be very difficult to find on store shelves and be expensive to buy regardless of whether or not Nvidia ramps up production in the next few weeks.
