The GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB is back on the global market

Five years after its debut, the GeForce RTX 3060 with 12 GB of memory is back on the global market. After months of rumors and early sightings in China, the GPU based on the Ampere architecture, which was withdrawn from production toward the end of 2025, has returned to the scene, with the first partners officially announcing their custom variants.

Palit and Gainward - both part of the same group - have respectively introduced the RTX 3060 Infinity 2 OC and the RTX 3060 Python II OC, cards that fully retain the technical specifications of the original model from 2021. At the heart of the card remains the GA106 graphics processor, produced by Samsung Foundry using a 8-nanometer manufacturing process, equipped with 3584 CUDA cores. The memory configuration consists of 12 GB of GDDR6 connected via a 192-bit bus, capable of a bandwidth of 360 GB/s at a frequency of 15 Gbps.

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The operating frequencies indicated by Palit are 1,320 MHz in base configuration and 1,792 MHz in boost: this latter value is slightly higher than the 1,777 MHz already indicated by NVIDIA as a reference boost. Palit has also announced that it will offer a non-overclocked version alongside the OC variant.

Regarding cooling, the card adopts two axial fans that, thanks to a 0 dB shutdown technology, remain completely still during light workloads. The declared consumption of the GPU is 170 W, with a recommended power supply of at least 550 W and a single 8-pin power connector. In terms of connectivity, the card offers an HDMI 2.1 output and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs.

Currently, Palit has not communicated an official price for the Infinity 2 OC, nor is the card listed with major retailers yet. Based on similar variants already appeared on the market, a price point around $329 can be assumed, although this figure has not been confirmed by the manufacturer.

The decision to bring the RTX 3060 back to the market is a result of a complex industrial context. Since late 2025, the PC hardware components sector has been experiencing strong price tension, caused by the rising demand for memory and production capacity from AI systems. After initially holding up better than other sectors, the graphics card market has also been affected by price increases, partly due to the fact that the current Blackwell generation uses GDDR7 memory, which is more expensive to produce, while several memory suppliers prefer to allocate production capacity to create more profitable HBM memory.

In this scenario, the opportunity to resume production of cards based on previous architectures, with GDDR6 memory less subject to this pressure, has been seen by NVIDIA as a chance to serve the market. It should be noted that, from a performance standpoint, the RTX 3060 12 GB remains a GPU based on an architecture from five years ago, with all the limitations that entails. There are already newer alternatives available on the current market at comparable prices: a GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, for example, can be found well below 400 euros, offering superior performance, supporting DLSS 4.5 with multi-frame generation, and better energy efficiency, although with only 8 GB of video memory, a factor that could hinder performance at higher resolutions or with ray tracing enabled.