Review – Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 Eagle 12G

The RTX 3060 is finally here and with a promise of a reduced efficiency for Ethereum mining so it won’t fall into the hands of the miners like the rest of the previously announced RTX 30 series cards – well, we’ll see about that soon enough. As NVIDIA has specifically mentioned that there will be no Founders Edition cards for the RTX 3060, you’ll have to look for the options available from the board partners like ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA, etc.

We managed to get our hands on the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 Eagle 12G this time, which we will be comparing against the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition to get a better grasp of what kind of performance we can expect from the RTX 3060.

Specifications

Unboxing

The RTX 3060 Eagle 12G packaging is pretty basic I’d say, but you’ll get most of the information such as the features, display output options, etc from the back and front of the box.

As there are no fancy accessories included, the only thing included together with the card is the quick installation guide as usual.

The Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 Eagle 12G

Gigabyte has released two models for its RTX 3060 Eagle for this round, the base model RTX 3060 Eagle 12G and the overclocked model RTX 3060 Eagle OC 12G. Other than the slight difference in the specifications, notably the clock speed, both models are pretty much identical in terms of design.

The cooling fan design is the WindForce 2X cooling system as usual, where both fans will spin in an alternate direction to reduce air turbulence and provide a wider coverage on the heatsink to improve the overall cooling performance.

From the side, we can see that the RTX 3060 Eagle 12G is equipped with a heatsink with four Copper heat pipes in direct contact with the GPU. It’s good to see that Gigabyte didn’t cheap out on the cooler design despite its compact design.

According to the official specifications, the RTX 3060 has a 170W rated TDP and 550W power supply requirement with a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. As it has the lowest power requirement in the list of RTX 30 series graphic card lineup, it makes a good upgrade option from a GTX 1060 or RTX 2060, especially those who are still rocking on a 550W power supply.

The backplate design is similar to the one we’ve seen on the RTX 3080 Eagle OC 10G, not the best-looking around though, but it did provide full coverage for the card so you don’t see any naked PCB exposed at the back.

A cutout can be seen at the near end of the card, similar to the one we’ve seen on pretty much all of the RTX 30 series cards released to date. The cutout allows the heat from the GPU to be channeled to the top section of your system which is then exhausted via the rear cooling fan.

And for the display output, the RTX 3060 Eagle 12G offers 2 x HDMI 2.1 and 2 x DisplayPort 1.4a for output, which will come in really handy for budget-oriented builds because most of the affordable display monitors you’ll find in the market will only come with a single HDMI and VGA port for input.

Test System Setup

For our games benchmark test, we’ve selected several AAA titles to run at their highest possible settings using the following setup under an ambient temperature of 31°C:

Games Benchmark (DirectX12) – RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition vs. RTX 3060 Eagle 12G

While we can’t really see any significant benefit of having a whopping 12GB worth of VRAM, the RTX 3060 still performs pretty well on 1440P with most of the games have their graphics settings cranked up to ultra. Lowering the graphics settings to medium or high will yield better results on 1440p but that’s pretty much what the RTX 3060 can do. Going up to 4K is definitely not something you want to do with the RTX 3060, so it’s best to keep things at 1440p at most if you don’t want to end up with smooth gameplay but mediocre-looking graphics just for the sake of playing the latest AAA titles at 4K resolution.

Games Benchmark (Ray Tracing) – RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition vs. RTX 3060 Eagle 12G

Moving on to the ray tracing performance, well, 1080p is probably the furthest you can go. Lowering the graphics settings on 1440p doesn’t really help much with the framerates as the improvement aren’t that significant. Games that offer DLSS performance mode will give you some boost but you will have to lower the graphics settings to medium or perhaps lower for very demanding titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Metro: Exodus, and Watch Dogs: Legion.

Thermals & Power Draw

For our thermal and power draw test, we’re using the FurMark stress test utility as usual. The load temperature of our RTX 3060 Eagle 12G peaked at 68°C, which isn’t half bad for the dual-fan cooler design that is barely audible even during full load. Even from a close distance, you can barely hear the fan noise if you have your PC’s side panel closed. Of course, if you want the card to run at a lower temperature, you can always adjust the fan curve to fit your preference as long you don’t end up with a 100% fan speed.

For the power draw, the RTX 3060 Eagle 12G will draw between 162-168W on most occasions and peaked at 170W for a short moment, depending on the kind of load the application or games demand from your GPU.

Final Thoughts

Other than applications that will take advantage of the whopping 12GB worth of VRAM, we don’t really see any significant performance gain in most of the games we’ve tested. Though it’s good to see an x60 card that actually comes with more than 6GB VRAM this time, something we don’t get to see in the past.

Performance-wise, there’s definitely a clear gap between both RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti, but the RTX 3060 is still powerful enough to satisfy most gamers who will be gaming on 1080P. While the RTX 2060 is already a decent card for 1080P gaming, the RTX 3060 is an upgrade on the ray-tracing performance thanks to the new 2nd-gen RT cores and 3rd-gen Tensor cores. The ray-tracing performance of 1080p on high settings is much commendable but because of the limited RT and Tensor cores on the GA106-300-A1 the RTX 3060 has, it’s best to not go full-on to ultra. The overall performance difference isn’t exactly like what we saw on an RTX 2080 vs. RTX 3080 showdown but it’s still a reasonable upgrade if you’re coming from cards like the GTX 1060, GTX 1050, GTX 1650.

As for the price, it’s no surprise that the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 Eagle 12G comes with a much higher price tag of RM 2089. Due to the current situation where stocks are limited and scalpers taking advantage of this to markup the price like crazy, it’s very unlikely that you’ll be able to get any RTX 3060 under $400 or RM2000, regardless of brands. What’s worse, despite the reduced efficiency for the mentioned cryptocurrency mining, there is still no guarantee that gamers can finally get their hands on an RTX 30 series card at least. Looking at the current situation, unless it’s an emergency upgrade or you’ve managed to find one with a decent price, it’s really difficult for us to recommend the card to anyone who is on a tight budget.

Pros

• Good performance on 1080P
• Cooler performs really well
• Runs silently even during full load
• Come with HDMI 2.1 and support AV1 decode
• Come with two HDMI output

Cons

• Not much significant performance gain with the 12GB worth of VRAM
• The overall performance gain from the previous generation is not very big

Subjective

• Expensive