Packaging

The Card

After reviewing all those high-powered cards in recent months, the EVGA RTX 3060 XC comes as a refreshingly compact design. The card still has the EVGA Ampere DNA thanks to its amazing backplate design—I actually like the red trim. The backplate is made from metal, unlike many other RTX 3060 cards.


Dimensions of the card are 20.5 x 11 cm, and it weighs 720 g.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4 and one HDMI 2.1.

The DisplayPort 1.4a outputs support Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2a, which lets you connect 4K displays at 120 Hz and 8K displays at 60 Hz. Ampere can drive two 8K displays at 60 Hz with just one cable per display.

Ampere is the first GPU to support HDMI 2.1, which increases bandwidth to 48 Gbps to support higher resolutions, like 4K144 and 8K30, with a single cable. With DSC, this goes up to 4K240 and 8K120. NVIDIA's new NVENC/NVDEC video engine is optimized to handle video tasks with minimal CPU load. The highlight here is added support for AV1 decode. Just like on Turing, you may also decode MPEG-2, VC1, VP8, VP9, H.264, and H.265 natively, at up to 8K@12-bit.

The encoder is identical to Turing. It supports H.264, H.265, and lossless at up to 8K@10-bit.


The card has one 8-pin power input. This configuration is rated for up to 225 W of power draw.


The GeForce RTX 3060 does not support SLI. Only the RTX 3090 has very limited SLI support.

Teardown

EVGA's thermal solution uses two heatpipes that are extra long to cover a lot of surface area. Note how this piece of the cooler provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry, too.


The VRM circuitry circled in red is cooled by the airflow of one of the fans right above. Two chokes sit directly under the heatpipes, for both of which EVGA has placed a thermal pad to ensure good heat transfer.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.