NVIDIA RTX 3060’s Listed at 8GB & 6GB Configs

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is a popular card, and you’ll find various listings going as high as containing 12GB of VRAM. Now that might be a bit extreme for a regular gaming set-up, both economically and functionally, so PC builders will be happy to know that graphic card manufacturer Palit has registered a 6GB.

First shown on the Korean National Radio Research Agency (via harukaze5719 on Twitter) this would be the first potential of a 6GB configuration of these graphic cards by an official manufacturer.

There were rumours last year about potential 6GB SKUs of Nvidia’s mainstream Ampere GPU, but this seems to further cement the fact that we’ll be seeing a more toned-down version of this card. Palit also seems to be the first official manufacturer to register this configuration for this specific card.

Another registration by Palit’s subsidiary brand, Gainward, seems to be registering for an 8GB version of the RTX 3060.

While the memory spec is still a bit hazy about these cards, it’s not the only change made to these AIBs. The number of CUDA cores may also get a change-up which would entail a change in performance figures as well. However, those eager for these new cards will have to wait to find out what Nvidia’s manufacturing are planning.

While this is great news for gamers, miners may be left a bit disappointed. Nvidia has reduced the mining efficiency by 50% on the RTX 3060 for Ethereum, but not other cryptocurrencies. While this is a software lock which may be broken very soon, crypto miners need not lose hope as Nvidia is launching dedicated Cryptocurrency Mining Processors (CMP). These are currently optimized for Ethereum mining. While they’re cards that can still be used to mine other cryptocurrencies, we do expect Nvidia to launch either dedicated CMP’s for other cryptos, or optimize their current models to be compatible with a wider variety of cryptocurrencies. 

It should also be noted that a registration doesn’t automatically mean that the card is going to be manufactured. There were registrations for an RTX 3060 20GB configuration early on, but the designed were then dropped. However, it does make sense for an 8GB and 6GB version to be designed if Nvidia wants to increase its scope of market. The 8GB version may become the most popular version, among both gamers and crypto miners, as it sits in the sweet spot between 6GB and 12GB.

About Nvidia

Nvidia Corporation is a multinational technology company incorporated in Delaware and based in Santa Clara, California.

Known for producing some of the best Graphical Processing Units (GPU) in the market, the company also provides parallel computing solutions to researchers and scientists worldwide. Not to mention, they also produce mobile computing chipsets in the form of Tegra Mobile Processors. The company was founded on April 5, 1993; almost 27 years ago, and competes with AMD (Mainly in GPUs), Intel, and Qualcomm (Processing Chipsets).