Wired: RTX 3060, budget bros; get this one

in july of 2016 Nvidia released possibly their most important GTX card, the GTX 1060, this card for years was popular amongst budget gamers, offering great performance in games at a much more palatable price than the GTX 1080 or the GTX 1070, Nvidia's GTX 1060 for years after its released remained the most popular graphics card according to steam's hardware survey, even as of today over 9% of steam users still use the GTX 1060, despite Nvidia trying to recreate their breakthrough, because to be quite frank, the budget market is the most important, in the top 10 steam graphics cards, not one xx80 card is visible, the most expensive card in the top 10 is the 2070 super, which still only holds 2% of steam's userbase nvidia tried (and failed) with the 2060, a card offering RTX support, but the only RTX specific features it could handle on decent settings was RTX voice and Nvidia broadcast, the 1660 (and 1660 super/ti) at MSRP the 1660 cards are complete rip-offs, even before cryptocucks wrecked everything however still offered a great option for a HTPC or similar, but i think the RTX 3060 will end this streak with its MSRP of 329.99 this card offers insane value (assuming you can get your hands on it)

Unboxing + First Impressions

i opted for the asus dual fan model, purely because it was the only one available its quite small and follows Nvidia's blow-through fan design, the asus card uses a standard 6+2pin power connector, the internet says this card should work with a decent 550w system but i opted for a corsair RM750 which is a nice modular 750w power supply, asus include a nice sort of pokemon card type thing in the box as well as the usual manuals which is a nice touch, though it appears the holographic stuff was printed wrong, kind of a bummer.

Performance In Gaming

im weird and dont play many of the "generic unreal engine realistic open world RPGs" so my tests are just with games i've played, on settings maxed out (with DLSS on balanced where applicable)

Valorant

playing valorant on max settings on the Ascent map gives an average of 267fps (however with a 1% low of 128fps) so on competitive settings you could easily play on a 240hz monitor

Cyberpunk 2077

playing Cyberpunk 2077 maxxed out on RTX ultra with DLSS set to balanced yielded 56fps average in busy areas such as jig-jig street and whatever that street is near doc's an average of 63fps was achieved in moderately built up areas such as megabuilding H11 (where V's apartment is" driving is inconsistent as the longer you drive the lower your framerate drops to, hopefully CDPR address this one-day

Fortnite

at competitive settings with epic texture quality and epic view distance showed a 244fps average, im not a fortnite player so its possible that bots were impacting framerate scores but i'd consider that unlikely

Performance with Crypto-Mining

all of the RTX 3000 cards are bad at crypto mining and you should never buy a RTX 3000 card for mining nicehash literally causes the graphics cards to melt in 99% of cases this isn't bait at all and not meant to sway people away from taking up all the GPUs for their capitalistic gains

Conclusion

the RTX 3060 offers great performance for the price (assuming you can get one at MSRP) and if any of nvidia's own has the price to performance to beat the 1060 its this one, the 12GB of vram makes it somewhat future proof to larger textures and such which is a nice bonus