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.