INTRODUCTION

   Roughly a month ago AMD released their latest Radeon RX 6600 XT graphics card which as sole goal had to “combat” the GeForce RTX 3060 by NVIDIA by offering the same performance for less. Well, the end results you all know, it did just that and quite successfully as well, at least in under 4k (2160p) resolutions. Unfortunately, since then pricing has increased quite considerably (largely thanks to Ethereum mining) and so in some cases these cards are quite similarly priced (depends on the model and manufacturer of course) which is why today i decided to test yet another one of those two, the ROG STRIX GAMING OC GeForce RTX 3060 12GB model by ASUS.

   For years since its establishment, ASUS aimed to put an ever-greater emphasis on PC gaming. This process resulted in the 2006 founding of the Republic of Gamers brand (ROG), formed for the sole purpose of delivering the most innovative hardcore hardware for truly dedicated gamers. Since then, the efforts of the ROG team have led to a constant flow of PC gaming technology that has become legendary among enthusiasts for its performance. ROG is more than just hardware, though – we take an active part in the global gaming community, helping develop the industry by sponsoring events such as PAX and Dreamhack. Worldwide media have recognized ROG as a leader in PC gaming and overclocking performance, with many of our products winning awards and gaining very positive feedback from hardware pros. With this great response from gamers and the industry, ROG has all the resources it needs to keep working on enabling even better experiences – technology never sleeps, nor should the action!

   Just like every other model in NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30x0 family the GeForce RTX 3060 is also based on their 2nd generation RTX technology that sports 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. The RTX 3060 however is based on the brand new GA106 chip (8nm) which packs 3584 shader units, 112 texture mapping units, 112 Tensor cores, 48 raster operators and 28 ray tracing cores. In terms of TDP the RTX 3060 12GB is rated for 170W and comes packed with 12GB of Samsung GDDR6 RAM based on a 192-bit memory bus with an effective clock speed of 15Gbps. The ROG STRIX GAMING OC is as expected a factory overclocked sample and so it comes ready with a boost clock of 1882MHz and features a custom cooling solution (triple axial-tech fan design with three heatsinks, five 8mm thick heatpipes, copper base and support for zero RPM mode when in idle), reinforced metal frame, dual BIOS switch, metal rear backplate and RGB LEDs for both the top and rear. Finally, in terms of available outputs the ROG STRIX GeForce RTX 3060 12GB comes ready with 3 DP v1.4a ports and a single HDMI v2.1 port (these support a total of 2 displays simultaneously with resolutions of up to 8K/7680x4320p).