Earlier this month HEXUS reported upon the official launch of the GeForce RTX 3060 with 12GB GDDR6 at Nvidia's GeForce RTX: Game On event at CES 2021. Now a couple of sources have been tipped off about the reviews published / hardware release date, and they are saying it will be right at the end of February.
VideoCardz shared an interesting GeForce RTX 3060 embargo schedule which provides more info than a simple hardware release date. According to the info it has received the next step in the RTX 3060 launch process will be 'Sample Seeding' which is scheduled for Friday 19th Feb. On this date "AICs can seed samples to the press and influencers," notes the report.
The next event son the schedule share the same "End of February" calendar slot. At this time reviews will be published while retailers start taking orders for and selling the first salvo of GeForce RTX 3090 12GB graphics cards. Looking at the calendar, the actual last day of February is on Sunday, so I'd say the reviews/release date is probably going to be in the working week ahead of that – say Thursday 25th or Friday 26th Feb.
Remember that Nvidia guidance says that the MSRP of the GeForce RTX 3060 with 12GB GDDR6 is US$329. I've seen some reports that retailers are already listing partner cards at nearer to US$400 – official RTX 3060 Ti territory – but I think it is too early to pay heed to these leaks, even if scalping/gouging and so on are somewhat inevitable.
It is likely we will see some leaked third party benchmarks in the last week ahead of availability. At CES Nvidia already provided a comparative performance chart which should give you a good idea of the capabilities of the upcoming GPU.
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Sources: VideoCardz, WCCFTech
