mobile-geforce-rtx-3060-turned-into-a-desktop-card-gets-benched-with-surprising-results

Do you keep in mind final 12 months when Chinese crypto-miners had been snatching up GeForce RTX 30-series laptops to make use of their GPUs for mining? The cellular GPUs by no means acquired a hash fee limitation, in contrast to the desktop fashions, so determined miners began propping up piles of laptops and pointing followers at them to make them mine quicker.

That’s actually inconvenient and space-inefficient—to not point out costly and wasteful—so artful crypto-miners began slapping down cellular GeForce RTX GPUs on desktop graphics playing cards. This observe is not new; we reported on it in March and it had already been happening for a bit at the moment.
An inventory for the same card.

We had been a bit curious what one in every of these playing cards may do in gaming, however on the top of the GPU scarcity, they had been going for as a lot as $550. Now that costs have come down considerably, Korean YouTube channel BullsLab (who we have reported on earlier than) picked up one of many playing cards on AliExpress for ¥2450 RMB (about $360) and put it by means of its paces in a gaming workload.

The playing cards are unusual, to say the least. Being primarily based on the cellular GeForce RTX 3060, they arrive with the fully-enabled GA106 GPU, which implies that they get the complete allotment of three,840 shaders as an alternative of the usual desktop card’s 3,584. However, where the desktop GeForce RTX 3060 card comes with 12GB of video RAM, the cellular model solely has 6GB.
BullsLab needed to get the hacked drivers over Telegram. Check out this shady readme.

Aside from these cuts, these playing cards are primarily much like the usual GeForce RTX 3060 with one enormous, large caveat—the NVIDIA drivers will not set up on them. BullsLab needed to get the drivers over Telegram from the AliExpress vendor, and so they include a doubtful notice to easily click on “Yes, YES, INSTALL” on something that pops up. Concerning, nevertheless it all appears to have labored out of their case.

Note the clock and temperature of the 3060M card, on the left.

The GPU that he obtained was restricted to 80W relatively than the 115W TDP of the cardboard in his laptop computer or the large 170W ranking of the desktop half. Despite that, it carried out very properly, boosting 200-300 MHz greater than the laptop computer half, due to the large dual-fan cooler strapped to it.

3DMark outcomes. Left to right: Desktop, “3060M” card, after which laptop computer.

The excessive clock together with the additional compute sources allowed the RTX 3060 to strike very close to to the desktop half regardless of being saddled with lower than half the ability restrict. It’s spectacular efficiency, and it makes us want NVIDIA had supplied these chips as a “3060 SUPER” or related. While the cardboard examined is locked down, it is simple to think about a GPU like this hitting sky-high clocks with a bit tweaking.