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The Nvidia RTX 3060 isn't set to be officially released until later this week—February 25 at 9 AM Pacific Time, to be exact. Yet the cards have been spotted in online stores all across the map early, and it wouldn't be surprising to hear people are rushing to snatch them up.
According to VideoCardz, a seller named Artem had three Gigabyte Eagle RTX 3060 cards on sale in Belarusian store Onliner over the weekend. The sale page has since disappeared, now throwing up a 404, but I'd bet these cards sold for their listing price of $1,080 each (in USD equivalent cash). That is, if they weren't pulled beforehand.
What's really funny about this listing is that these sale images clearly show the serial numbers. That makes it a doddle for Gigabyte to trace the cards and find out exactly where they slipped off the truck. Perhaps it's only a matter of time before someone gets the sack.
People are falling over themselves to get these cards, it would seem, despite the supposedly unhackable mining limiters Nvidia has decided to impose. I'm sure a few have taken this as an open invitation to try to disable it. Though it's still entirely possible to make a little profit crypto mining with these lower-end cards, even with the half hash rate limit.
Perhaps these early resellers are miners looking for a way to get rid of the less-than-useful cards for a healthy profit.
The RTX 3060 is also set to be just as popular with those of us who just want to get some good, old fashioned gaming underway. With a base config including 12GB of VRAM, and a 1.78GHz boost clock—with the potential to top 2GHz in some instances—these cards look like tiny beasts just waiting to be unleashed.
All this means there's going to be a lot of interest in the cheapest Ampere generation graphics card to date. You'll want to get your clicking fingers ready if you've any chance of snapping up an RTX 3060 on Thursday, before some amount of them will inevitably be snatched up by resellers like this one.
Utterly shameless.
