Conclusion
Today we have reviewed the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3060 GAMING OC 12G GV-N3060GAMING OC-12GD video card revision 1.0. GIGABYTE has really pulled through here with an offering that provides high clock speeds and competitive performance with more premium cards in a package that isn’t exceedingly flashy. This is a market that often feels underserved in the modern PC hardware enthusiast era. The I/O on this video card is evenly divided among the two current modern display interface connections, something we can appreciate.
We focused our review squarely on the target resolution intended for these video cards, 1080p. DLSS and Ray Tracing performance were also tested for their respective performance increases and decreases. All of this was done while comparing against cheaper and more expensive GeForce RTX 3060 GPU-based video cards from other AIB’s.
Performance and Features
This card stayed above its specified boost clock at all times, with a minimum clock speed that was 75MHz or 4% faster than the specifications. That means it managed to maintain a minimum of 1912MHz when its rated boost clock is 1837MHz; that’s a substantial result out of the box. Taking a look at the average clock speed shows us reaching 1947MHz, which sits comfortably 100MHz and 6% above the given boost clock. It became clear to us during testing that this GIGABYTE model was capable of reaching and sustaining high clock speeds even without adjusting anything and while utilizing the stock cooling solution.
Features here are reasonable, with GIGABYTE implementations of technologies such as 3D Active Fans, Alternate Spinning Fans, Graphene Nano Lubricant, Direct Touch Heat Pipes, and Screen Cooling Passthrough, and it’s all tied together with a 3-year limited local warranty. These are some fairly premium features for a card that isn’t at the top of GIGABYTE’s GeForce RTX 3060 GPU product stack. We would be remiss not to mention all the NVIDIA-specific features that lead to a more enjoyable end-user experience, like DLSS, RTX Voice, GeForce RTX I/O, and GeForce Experience’s built-in gameplay recording and streaming features.
Gameplay performance was excellent, with our GIGABYTE card managing to compete nicely with the more Premium ASUS model. We saw wins in several benchmarks, a couple of stalemates in a few others, and a razor-thin loss here and again. This is kind of a mixed bag, with most of these losses and or wins being so small they are within the margin of error. These cards are essentially performing nearly identically in almost all titles. While this isn’t some commanding win it’s still impressive given that this is not GIGABYTE’s premium GeForce RTX 3060 Video card while on the ASUS side it is.
Overclocking
Our overclocking results left us impressed with how consistent the frequency was in both synthetic applications and games. When we received the card, we did not expect to see such a good result considering the smaller size of this thermal solution when compared to the ASUS card. Yet when we started to create our graph, it become very clear that this video card would be able to stabilize its overclock far better than any previous GeForce RTX 3060 we have reviewed. This becomes so apparent when you juxtapose the overclock vs default frequency graphs from this review and our previous review of its ASUS competition.
At a minimum, we managed to reach 2137MHz which matches our ASUS card’s overclocked minimums when overclocked. This plays out again with both cards managing to tie for average clock speeds of 2173Mhz. We see some separation occur when looking at Maximum clock speeds where the ASUS card only reaches 2175MHz our GIGABYTE card got to 2182MHz. Going off the numbers they look to be very close but again it’s the consistency of our GIGABYTE cards clock speeds that’s so impressive.
Final Points
The GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3060 GAMING OC 12G is a strong performer in all games tested, even managing to achieve higher clock speeds than the competition. All in all, we appreciated this card’s simple name, monochromatic color scheme, WINDFORCE 3X COOLING SYSTEM, and a touch of RGB. GIGABYTE’s AORUS ENGINE Software was a pleasure to use with no anomalies during our time working with it.
If you are looking to game at 1080p then this card makes a lot of sense as long as you can find it at a reasonable price. We would go so far as to say this is the perfect video card for someone introducing a younger first-time computer gamer to the platform. That’s all thanks to its ample performance in rasterization and ray-traced titles, atop of features like DLSS that allow you to increase frame rates for the most demanding titles. Features like that can take a stuttering mess and turn it into an enjoyable experience.