Nvidia RTX 3060 Review ft. Gigabyte Gaming OC

The Gigabyte RTX 3060 Gaming OC 12G ships in a black box, with Gigabyte's robotic eye logo dominating the front.

On the back, the company highlights some key features on the card, including its fan configuration and metal backplate.

The only included accessory is a small quick-start guide.

As for the card itself, the design is identical to other Gaming OC cards we have reviewed this generation, including the RTX 3070 model. This means we have a plastic shroud that's mostly black, but with a couple of grey sections as well. All told, it is a pretty understated design and it's very colour neutral.

For the cooler, Gigabyte is using its WindForce 3X design, obviously meaning it is a triple-fan configuration, with each fan measuring 80mm. As we have come to expect, the fans utilise Gigabyte’s Alternate Spinning feature, where the central fan spins in reverse relative to the outer two, which should reduce turbulence and increase overall pressure down onto the heatsink itself.

While we haven't yet tested other RTX 3060s, I'd expect this card to be one of the bigger ones – it measures 282mm x 117mm x41mm. We test thermals and noise levels later in the review.

The backplate is a full-length metal design, in a greyish/silver colour. It features the Gigabyte branding printed in white text, just below the GeForce RTX branding. A large cut-out towards the end of the card is designed to allow airflow to pass directly through the heatsink.

For display outputs, we find 2x HDMI 2.1 and 2x DisplayPort 1.4. Power requirements are a single 8-pin PCIe connector.

In terms of the PCB, Gigabyte is using a 6 phase VRM for the GPU and 2 phase VRM for the memory. The GPU VRM is controlled by a UPI uP9512R and uses Alpha and Omega AOZ5311NQI MOSFETs. The memory VRM is controlled by a UPI uP1666Q and uses AON6994 asymmetric dual-N-channel MOSFETs.

Despite the memory being officially specced at 15Gbps, we can see Gigabyte is using 16Gbps modules from Samsung, model code ‘K4ZAF325BM-HC16.'

The cooler meanwhile is comprised of three aluminium fin stacks. These are connected by three 6mm copper heatpipes which make direct contact with the GPU die. The VRM and memory contact with separate plates on the heatsink via thermal pads.

The metal backplate does not use thermal pads to contact with the back of the PCB.

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