Friday, July 22nd 2022
Unofficial NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060M Performs Within an Inch of the RTX 3060
Remember those unofficial GeForce RTX 3060 cards that sported "hackamajigged" Mobile versions of the NVIDIA RTX 3060 desktop GPU wrapped in a shiny, desktop-like shroud? Well, those cards are now surfacing again just as Ethereum's Merge approaches (for the umpteenth time, it has to be said). Miners have taken to offload their graphics cards in order to recoup their hardware investment costs. Despite the recent positive price action, which saw Ethereum in particular recovering 34% of its value in about a week, there's only so much time left to mine before all those re-purposed GPUs become "nothing more" than gaming graphics cards. And those are usually superfluous beyond one per rig - never mind the numbers used by miners.
As these cards are now surfacing in the secondary markets, some benchmarks are also leaking. According to a Korean YouTuber, It appears that the RTX 3060M is actually a pretty competent RTX 3060. The GeForce RTX 3060M makes use of the same GA106 (Ampere) silicon as the GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile, sporting 3,840 CUDA cores and 6 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory (256 more CUDA cores than the desktop version, as wider, lesser-clocked GPUs sport better power efficiency profiles). The desktop shroud does allow it to unlock an additional 300 MHz in core frequency, while reducing its TDP from 105 W down to just 80 W.
The 3060M benchmarks shave shown in to be within 2-3% of the desktop version within the 3D Mark Fire Strike and Time Spy test runs. At the same time, it ended up being round 3% faster than the pure Mobile version, despite having less watts at its disposal. The benefits of undervolting and overclocking, uh?
Source:
via Tom's Hardware
As these cards are now surfacing in the secondary markets, some benchmarks are also leaking. According to a Korean YouTuber, It appears that the RTX 3060M is actually a pretty competent RTX 3060. The GeForce RTX 3060M makes use of the same GA106 (Ampere) silicon as the GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile, sporting 3,840 CUDA cores and 6 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory (256 more CUDA cores than the desktop version, as wider, lesser-clocked GPUs sport better power efficiency profiles). The desktop shroud does allow it to unlock an additional 300 MHz in core frequency, while reducing its TDP from 105 W down to just 80 W.
27 Comments on Unofficial NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060M Performs Within an Inch of the RTX 3060
It's identical silicon that, once unleashed from the crippling power restrictions of a laptop's tiny cooler, performs as expected.
The laptop silicon has almost negligible configuration differences:
Something tells me, they sell the cards because they are preparing for new series of graphics cards and since the lucrative means of mining has dropped recently it is a good time for miners to reinvest sale old wait for new because with new graphics cards, there will be new boom on the crypto again and they can maximize profit. Standard business scenario.
Now if they offered a 3080 Ti 7424 CUDA 16GB at $300 plus 3 year warranty that would be a deal.
But bad chips or faulty ones who can't pass as 3060 gets 3060m would not surprise m.
The RTX 3060's 12 is overkill, but performance would be castrated by running the same 128-bit bus as 3050)
8GB for 1440p
10GB for 4k
Could technically go lower but as of 2022, this is what is optiminal for these resolutions.
I'm always happy to get >90% of the performance for <60% of the power consumption because "maximum silence" is my key metric. I want as much performance as possible without being able to hear the GPU.
I'm asking because these cards are 150 euro on AliExpress, at 100 I would buy one as a backup GPU, good efficiency and solid 1080p performance.