Nvidia will officially release the new GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card on February 25 – but Australians will have to wake up early in the morning to snag one.
The RTX 3060 – pitched at CES 2021 as an entry-level GPU for high-quality ray-traced gaming at 1080p – will launch on February 25 at 12PM US Eastern Standard Time, or 4am Sydney time on February 26.
Unlike other entries in the RTX 30-series (the 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080, and 3090), Nvidia will not be releasing a first-party “Founders Edition” of the 3060, with all cards to be manufactured and sold through partners like MSI, Gigabyte, and Asus.
The RTX 3060 Ti.
The cards are likely to sell out quickly, with the Ampere-powered 30-series plagued by stock shortages as a whole. The problem has been exacerbated by scalpers and bots buying up the cards and selling them at huge markups, as well as investors using them to mine cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Etherium; there have been reports as well of miners buying up entire laptops with 30-series cards.
Nvidia has released stocks of older 20-series and 10-series cards to board partners in an effort to relieve stock issues on the 30-series, but problems are expected to persist due in part to a raw materials shortage.
The RTX 3060 will start at $329 USD (about $430 AUD), but it is not yet clear how much cards will actually cost in Australia.
