GALAX GeForce RTX 3060 EX White 12G review - Introduction

Galax GeForce RTX 3060 EX White review

This round all of your base are belong to GALAX; join us as we evaluate their GeForce RTX 3060 EX White variant, which has the same 12GB of memory and 3584 shading processors but features a reference factory boost speed of 1780 MHz. Our tested model also features a two-fan all-white design. This graphics card has been tweaked right out of the box for you, and our tested model has a two-fan design for cooling. With that 3584 shading cores and Ampere architecture, this 3060 series is bound to impress in the 2560x1440 (WQHD) domain. If we look back at the previous generation, the product would sit at GeForce RTX 2070 (SUPER) performance levels and, in due time, will replace that series. If stock becomes available in plentiful volumes though. The GPU is again fabricated on an 8nm node derived from Samsung. This process further develops Samsung's 10nm process; no EUV is applied in production just yet. The first wave of announcements has seen the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 being released first, and, as a bit of a surprise, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and 3070. It's now late February 2021 and NVIDIA is set to release its more 'regular' 3060 prices 329 USD but in this day and age, that price can be anything. As you will have noticed, the 3060 GPU cores count is about 26 percent lower than with the RTX 3060 Ti, which has a GA104 chip with 4864 shading cores (shader/stream/cuda cores = all the same thing with a different name). NVIDIA is launching the 3060 series with the 12GB model, which's remarkably enough is 2GB more than the GeForce RTX 3080 (!). Later on, they'll likely silently slip in a 6 GB version, though that has not been confirmed. NVIDIA advertises the series with 13 'shader teraflops' and 25 'RT-ops', the latter giving an indication of the ray-tracing performance. Notable is that a change is in effect, the memory runs at 15 Gbps as opposed to the usual 14 Gbps, likely to compensate for the perf hit of going 256-bit towards 192-bit on the memory bus due to that memory configuration. It's the same for the shader core cluster, it's clocked higher in the boost frequency compared to the Ti model, also compensating a bit for the lower number of shader cores. The Ampere lineup nearly doubles ray-tracing performance with Gen2 ray-tracing cores and 3rd iteration Tensor cores. These cards will all be PCIe 4.0 interface compatible and offer HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4a, but most importantly is that exorbitant shader processor count (referred to as CUDA cores by NVIDIA). With just over a third of the shader processor count seen from the flagship product, we now meet the NVIDIA GA106 GPU. And despite being a lower segmented card, it still holds a sizable GPU die. In this round, NVIDIA is not seeding Founder edition cards, aka FE GeForce RTX 3060. But of course, they do present the reference specification; a boost clock of 1780 MHz and a base clock of 1320 MHz. 

Galax GeForce RTX 3060 Ex White 12G

Dual slot, a white design, two fans, little RGB, what's not to like. The GALAX RTX 3060 EX graphics card is remarkably comparable to the black RTX 3060 Ti EX. It shares the same design and cooling approach as the previous model. It ships with a reference boost clock speed of 1780. However, the out-of-the-box speed is somewhat irrelevant due to default power limiters. The GALAX RTX 3060 EX White can easily boost above its reference value thanks to NVIDIA's GPU Boost technology and the large heatsink combined with the bespoke PCB design. Additionally, the RTX 3060 features an HDMI 2.1 output that supports 4K@120Hz. Additionally, it includes an AV1 decoder, which offers superior compression and quality compared to existing codecs such as H.264, HEVC, and VP9. According to the manufacturer, AV1 offers a 50% bitrate savings over H.264. Additional features of the 3060 are listed below. The card has a slightly higher TDP of 187 W, and it is connected through a single 8-pin socket only. The card is of course paired with 12GB GDDR6 graphics memory at 192-bit running at 15 Gbps. It is a more simplified-looking product.  The card has a single (6+2) pin power header.  Let's have a look at how well the product performs.