INTRODUCTION

   Competition has always been good for the end consumer and nowhere in the PC industry has this applied more than graphics cards. Yes, we recently had AMD surpass Intel in the CPU market with their pretty impressive Ryzen 5000 series but the number of times AMD CPUs have taken on Intel models simply pales in comparison with the number of times AMD (ATI prior to that) graphics cards have gone up against NVIDIA ones (for the record this has been happening since the mid-90's). It so happens that we're currently witnessing yet another "strong" competition between AMD and NVIDIA, this time between their Radeon RX6x00 and GeForce RTX 30x0 lines which currently include high and ultra-high-end models. Since the market is vast however both manufacturers have now turned their focus to the mid-end (value) segment of the market and today I’ll be testing the just released GeForce RTX 3060 12GB and more specifically the iGame Advanced OC model by Colorful.

   Established in 1995, Colorful is a brand with a 20+ year history. It is a comprehensive company that holds the largest share in the Chinese graphics card market, integrating independent development, production, and sales. Also, it is a strategic partner of NVIDIA, AMD, and INTEL in China. By now, Colorful covers product line of motherboards, graphics cards, all-in-one PC, memory & SSD, industrial server, computer case, power supply, Hi-Fi player, industrial integration solution and services with over 24 years of experience delivering quality products garnering a brilliant reputation amongst its customers.

   Just like the rest of the GeForce RTX 30x0 family the newest member (GeForce RTX 3060) is also based on the 2nd generation of NVIDIA's RTX technology which this time over features CUDA cores with FP32+INT32 instructions (for simultaneous floating point and integer math), 2nd gen RT cores, 3rd gen Tensor cores and ray trace motion-blur effects. Unlike however its brother the RTX 3060 Ti the new RTX 3060 is based on the brane new GA106 GPU (8nm) which packs 3584 shader units, 112 texture mapping units, 112 Tensor cores, 48 raster operators and 28 ray tracing cores. Also, the GeForce RTX 3060 has a TDP of 170W and comes packed with 12GB of Samsung GDDR6 RAM based on a 192-bit memory bus and with an effective clock speed of 15Gbps. As for the iGame Advanced OC model by Colorful it comes ready with a factory overclocked boost clock of 1867MHz (you can also use the stock 1777MHz clocks - RAM clocks however remain the same), custom cooling solution (triple fan, dual heatsink design with four 8mm thick heatpipes, copper base and support for zero RPM mode when in idle), reinforced metal frame, one-key overclock button (1777MHz to 1867MHz), rear backplate and RGB LEDs for the main fan (11 effects). Finally, in terms of available outputs the iGame GeForce RTX 3060 12GB comes ready with 3 DP v1.4 ports and a single HDMI v2.1 port (these support a total of 2 displays simultaneously with resolutions of up to 8K/7680x4320p). So, time to see how the latest GeForce RTX 3060 performs.