NVIDIA · GeForce RTX 30 Series
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 specs, benchmarks, and best prices. 12GB GDDR6, 3584 CUDA cores. Budget Ampere GPU.
Performance
22
DGaming
24
DValue
50
CTypical street price (used market)
$200–275
Launch MSRP $329 · Released Feb 2021
Prices vary with the 2026 memory shortage. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
How This Compares
Price vs gaming performance among similar GPUs (within ±$200 MSRP). Higher and further left = better value.
Full Specifications
| VRAM | 12GB |
| Memory Type | GDDR6 |
| Boost Clock | 1777MHz |
| Base Clock | 1320MHz |
| Shader/Stream Processors | 3584 |
| Performance | 12.7TFLOPS |
| TDP | 170W |
| Memory Bus | 192-bit |
| Bandwidth | 360GB/s |
| Architecture | Ampere |
| Process Node | 8nm |
| RT Cores | 28 |
| AI Upscaling | DLSS 2.0 |
| Interface | PCIe 4.0 x16 |
| Power Connector | 1x 8-pin |
| Card Length | 242mm |
| Release Date | 2021-02-25 |
Local AI on the RTX 3060
With 12GB of VRAM, here's what this card can run and how fast — estimated from memory bandwidth, the number that actually decides LLM speed.
| Model | Best quant that fits | Est. speed | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3 8B | Q8_0 | ~21 tok/s (Comfortable) | Runs great |
| Llama 3.1 8B | Q8_0 | ~21 tok/s (Comfortable) | Runs great |
| Qwen3.5 35B-A3B | — | — | Partial offload |
| Qwen3 32B | — | — | Partial offload |
| DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B | — | — | Partial offload |
| Gemma 4 31B | — | — | Partial offload |
| Qwen3 30B-A3B | — | — | Partial offload |
| Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B | — | — | Partial offload |
2 of 8 featured models run fully in VRAM on this card. Check a custom model size →
Compare RTX 3060 With
Understand the Specs
Browse all terms →GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)
A specialized processor designed for parallel computation, primarily used for rendering graphics but increasingly important for AI and compute workloads.
VRAM (Video RAM)
Dedicated memory on a graphics card used to store textures, frame buffers, and render data. More VRAM allows higher resolutions and more detailed textures.
Ray Tracing
A rendering technique that simulates how light physically behaves — bouncing, reflecting, and refracting — to produce photorealistic lighting, shadows, and reflections in games.
DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling)
NVIDIA's AI-powered upscaling technology that renders games at lower resolution and uses neural networks to reconstruct near-native image quality at much higher frame rates.
FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution)
AMD's upscaling technology that boosts frame rates by rendering at lower resolution and reconstructing detail. FSR 4 uses AI on RDNA 4 hardware; older versions work on any GPU.
CUDA Cores
NVIDIA's term for the parallel processing units in their GPUs. More CUDA cores generally means more rendering and compute power. AMD's equivalent are Stream Processors.