NVIDIA now selling salvaged GA104 GPUs as RTX 3060
NVIDIA spawns a new model featuring GA104 GPU, but with specs of a GA106 based RTX 3060 model.
NVIDIA reusing higher-end GPUs for lower SKUs is not exactly a new topic. Once the company accumulates a large stock of dies that cannot be sold as any other model, the decision is made to supply those chips to AIBs, who then sell them directly to customers, often not even mentioning it has a different GPU.
An appearance of the GA104-based RTX 3060 model has been discovered by @T4CFantasy, the maintainer of TechPowerUP’s GPU database. According to him, this new model has a device ID of 2487.
Historically speaking, GX104 and 106 GPUs often share the same pin layout, which makes the transition process for AIBs seamless. There are, however, often small variances when it comes to TDP. For this reason, NVIDIA is not allowing GX104 GPUs to be sold ’60 series’ anywhere else but China, where consumer laws aren’t as strong as in Europe or North America where the product needs to be exactly as described.
The RTX 3060 with GA104 GPU would feature 3584 CUDA cores and 12GB of GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit interface. This would, in fact, be the first GA104 GPU with more than 8GB of memory. What this also means is that nearly 42% of the full chip is disabled, which is a lot more than 7% on the ‘original’ RTX 3060.
The card with the lowest count of CUDA cores officially shipping with GA104 GPU is a mobile RTX A3000 graphics card with 4096 CUDAs. In other words, anything that has fewer cores is simply of no use to NVIDIA. A question arises though, what are NVIDIA plans in regard to RTX 3060 SUPER. The last-gen RTX 2060 SUPER featured TU104 GPU whereas the non-SUPER was TU106 based. With the Ampere series though, NVIDIA still has 7% of GA106 GPU to use for the higher-end model.
| NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 3060 Series | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| VideoCardz.com | RTX 3060 TI | RTX 3060 | RTX 3060 |
| Picture |  |  | |
| GPU | GA104-200 | GA104-XXX | GA106-300 |
| CUDA Cores | 4864 | 3584 | 3584 |
| Cores Disabled | 21% | 42% | 7% |
| Memory | 8GB GDDR6 256b | 12GB GDDR6 192b | 12GB GDDR6 192b |
Source:
Recycled GA104s used in unannounced RTX 3060shttps://t.co/ma9XHreCc3 new dev ID 2487
— Matthew Smith (@T4CFantasy) September 17, 2021
