The RTX 5060 officially arrives on May 19 in desktop and laptop formats, starting at 9 a.m. PT at your favorite PC retailer. According to Nvidia, the graphics card will start at $299, while the most affordable laptop equipped with this GPU begins at $1,099. The RTX 5060 is the most affordable desktop and laptop 50-series GPU the company has announced, although we've seen rumors of a more affordable RTX 5050 surface in various documents and filings.
Nvidia's mainstream offering will launch for consumers just a day before Computex and about a day after the AMD RX 9060 XT is reportedly set to go on sale. It's also priced somewhat competitively, retaining the $299 launch price of the previous generation 4060. This will make it $70 cheaper than the RTX 5060 Ti 8 GB and $130 more affordable than the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB. However, it's still $50 more than the Intel Arc B580, which has 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, and we're unsure if it will be widely available at MSRP. After all, we've had some difficulty finding other RTX 50-series GPUs at MSRP, so why would this be any different?
The company claims that the GeForce RTX 5060 will offer "double the performance of the previous generation GeForce RTX 4060 in games with DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation." However, this will only truly reflect in the latest titles compatible with this tech. If your favorite game is a bit older or does not support the latest version of DLSS, the performance gains you might see will likely be a bit more modest.
Still, if you're eager to buy a new mainstream GPU for your system, you should wait for trusted reviews to drop before making a purchase decision. That way, you're getting a full picture of what the GPU can offer and maybe even see some comparison tests against the competition. After all, you don't want to spend your hard-earned money on a problematic graphics card or one that won't perform well with your PC. For example, the RTX 5060 Ti 8 GB has some noticeable performance drops when attached via PCIe 4.0 on select titles, so this is something you'd want to watch out for.
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