Gainward and Galax put GeForce RTX 3060 with GA104 GPU on websites

Gainward and Galax have put new RTX 3060 video cards with a partially disabled GA104 GPU on their websites. GA104 chips are used in higher positioned RTX 30 GPUs. However, the specifications of the new RTX 3060 appear to be unchanged.

Gainward and Galax have published the revamped RTX 3060 variants on their Chinese websites, VideoCardz noted this weekend. The product pages state that those manufacturers offer RTX 3060 video cards with a GA140-150 GPU. Normally RTX 3060 video cards have a GA106-300 or GA106-302 GPU with 3584 CUDA cores. GA104 GPUs are physically larger and are used in the RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070 and RTX 3070 Ti.

VideoCardz writes that the specifications of the GA104-150 GPU are, however, largely the same as those of the GA106 chips in the previous RTX 3060 variants. The chip again has 3584 CUDA cores and the 192-bit interface and 12GB GDDR6 memory of the video card also remain unchanged. The tech website speculates that it is possible that the number of render output units has changed, or that possible GPU-specific features have been enabled. However, that has not yet been confirmed. It seems that the RTX 3060 variants with GA104 chip are only sold in China for now. The suggested retail price would be unchanged from the GA106 versions.

Nvidia has not officially announced the release of an RTX 3060 refresh with GA104 chip. With the new variant, the company can still use GA104 GPUs that are not good enough for an RTX 3060 Ti or higher due to defects in a lower-positioned RTX 3060. That strategy is used more often. For example, EVGA released a KO variant of the GeForce RTX 2060 in January last year, which featured a partially disabled RTX 2080 GPU.