Nvidia RTX 3060 goes on sale as retailer apparently jumps the gun

The recently-announced Nvidia RTX 3060 has been pictured in the wild ahead of its rumored release later this month.

Nvidia first showed off the RTX 3060 at CES 2021, where it touted the graphics card as mid-range graphics card designed to bring ray traced gaming to every PC gamer. While Nvidia confirmed that the GPU will go on sale for $329 (about £255 / AU$460), making it the cheapest card in the RTX 3000-series, it failed to reveal when the card will go on sale.

While rumors point to a February 25 release date, some eagle-eyed Redditors have already spotted the GPU in the wild.

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Reddit user He_never_sleeps claims to have stumbled upon two Gigabyte RTX 3060 on shelves in an unnamed European country, and even managed to pick one of the two GPUs available. 

However, given the RTX 3060 hasn’t officially been released yet, he notes that he can’t get the card functioning in Windows due to the lack of available drivers.

Separately, a second Reddit user claims one of the shops in his unnamed country has seven units of a PALIT RTX 3060 12GB graphics card in stock, which is being sold for $750 USD - more than double the MSRP. 

As it turns out, according to Wccftech, that country is Pakistan. Official Nvidia distributor Zah Computers has the card up for sale as of this writing, but how long that remains the case is anyone's guess.

Although the Nvidia RTX 3060 has started hitting store shelves ahead of its rumored release in two week’s time, it remains to be seen whether the GPU’s launch will be just as messy as its predecessors. 

Supply issues have been a consistent issue with the latest generation of GPUs from Nvidia, with the RTX 3080 and RTX 3060 Ti being particularly badly hit.

Things look set to worsen too, as European retailer Alternate revealed this week that the availability of the RTX 3000 series cards will deteriorate further in the first quarter of 2021 – which could cause prices of the GPUs to increase.

Via: PCGamesn

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