EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC BLACK GAMING Review

Introduction

It's been a while since I've had an EVGA graphics card through the GPU labs here at TweakTown, but today is that day -- it's the mid-range EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC BLACK GAMING.

EVGA's new GeForce RTX 3060 XC BLACK GAMING graphics card is a smaller card that will fit into a mITX gaming rig and give it some damn good GPU grunt. We have the usual 12GB of GDDR6 memory here, more than the RTX 3080 and its 10GB, but you won't be crypto mining on the RTX 3060.

It's a compact card that comes in at just over 200mm in length, and still manages to pack in a high-quality heat sink, dual fans, and my favorite of all: a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. This means the GeForce RTX 3060 XC BLACK GAMING graphics card offers the most stock performance out of all the custom cards I've tested so far, sticking close to "reference" form as NVIDIA didn't make a GeForce RTX 3060 Founders Edition.

NVIDIA has a sneaky "starting from $329 MSRP" on the GeForce RTX 3060 but you will expect to pay $450-$500 or even much, much more for a custom GeForce RTX 3060.

Everything You Need to Know About The RTX 3060

NVIDIA's previous-gen GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card was a super-popular mid-range graphics card, offering 1920 CUDA cores from its GPU compared to the 3584 CUDA cores on the new GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card.

But the big upgrade comes in the VRAM with 6GB on the GTX 1060 blowing up into a huge 12GB on the RTX 3060, both on a 192-bit memory bus with the GTX 1060 rocking 336GB/sec of memory bandwidth the new RTX 3060 boasts 360GB/sec memory bandwidth.

EVGA marketing

You can read all about the card on the official EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC BLACK GAMING website.

Detailed Look

EVGA has a teeny-tiny retail package for its GeForce RTX 3060 XC BLACK EDITION graphics card, which is very different to the normally oversized retail packages that mid-range graphics cards come in. The card itself is small, so there's no need for the package to be huge... thanks, EVGA!

From the front it looks mean as hell with small little 'Es' all over the fans... standing for EVGA, of course.

The normal "XC" model has a backplate, versus the XC BLACK GAMING that I have here without the backplate. I would suggest grabbing the model with the backplate.

It's a thin dual-slot card, which goes in its favor being a mid-range GPU. I don't understand why all these custom mid-range graphics cards have to be 2.7-slot or huge 3-slot cards when they're not flagship graphics cards. EVGA has done well here containing the Turing GPU and 12GB of GDDR6 under the hood in a neat dual-slot design.

You need just a single 8-pin PCIe power connector for the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC BLACK EDITION graphics card.

Display connectivity is the same as other GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards: 3 x DisplayPort 1.4 and 1 x HDMI 2.1 connectors for I/O on the back of the card.

Test System Specs

Latest upgrade:

Sabrent sent over their huge Rocket Q 8TB NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 SSD, which will be my new Games install SSD inside of my main test bed.

I've got a new upgrade inside of my GPU test bed before my change to a next-gen test bed, where I will be preparing for NVIDIA's next-gen Ampere graphics cards and AMD's next-gen RDNA 2 graphics cards.

Sabrent helped out with some new storage for my GPU test beds, sending over a slew of crazy-fast Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 SSDs. I've got this installed into my GPU test bed as the new Games Storage drive, since games are so damn big now. Thanks to Sabrent, I've got 2TB of super-fast M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD storage now.

Anthony's GPU Test System Specifications

I've recently upgraded my GPU test bed -- at least for now, until AMD's new Ryzen 9 5950X processor is unleashed then the final update for 2020 will happen and we'll be all good for RDNA 2 and future Ampere GPU releases. You can read my article here: TweakTown GPU Test Bed Upgrade for 2021, But Then Zen 3 Was Announced.

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3800X (buy from Amazon)
• Motherboard: ASUS ROG X570 Crosshair VIII HERO (buy from Amazon)
• Cooler: CoolerMaster MasterLiquid ML360R RGB (buy from Amazon)
• RAM: G.SKILL Trident Z NEO RGB 32GB (4x8GB) (F4-3600C18Q-32GTZN) (buy from Amazon)
• SSD: Sabrent 2TB Rocket NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 (buy from Amazon)
• PSU: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 1200W (buy from Amazon)
• Case: InWin X-Frame 2.0
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Professional x64 (buy from Amazon)

Benchmarks - Synthetic

3DMark Fire Strike

3DMark has been a staple benchmark for years now, all the way back to when The Matrix was released and Futuremark had bullet time inspired benchmarks. 3DMark is the perfect tool to see if your system - most important, your CPU and GPU - is performing as it should. You can search results for your GPU, to see if it falls in line with other systems based on similar hardware.

3DMark TimeSpy

Heaven - 1080p

Heaven is an intensive GPU benchmark that really pushes your silicon to its limits. It's another favorite of ours as it has some great scaling for multi-GPU testing, and it's great for getting your GPU to 100% for power and noise testing.

Benchmarks - 1080p

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla is the latest game to be inserted into our benchmark suite, with Ubisoft Montreal using its AnvilNext engine to power the game. It scales really well across the cards, and has some surprising performance benefits with AMD's new Big Navi GPUs.

You can buy Assassins Creed: Valhalla at Amazon.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is a sequel to the popular Shadow of Mordor, which was powered by the Lithtech engine. When cranked up to maximum detail, it will chew through your GPU and its VRAM like it's nothing.

You can buy Middle-earth: Shadow of War at Amazon.

Metro Exodus is one of the hardest tests that our graphics cards have to go through, with 4A Games' latest creation being one of the best looking games on the market. It is a serious test that pushes GPUs to their limits, and also features RTX technologies like DLSS.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one of the latest games to join our graphics card benchmark lineup, with the game built using the Foundation engine as a base, the same engine in Rise of the Tomb Raider. Eidos Montreal R&D department made lots of changes to the engine during the development of Shadow of the Tomb Raider to make it one of the best-looking games out right now.

1080p Benchmark Performance Thoughts

Performance falls in line with all of the other GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards at 1080p, where it will easily give you 1080p 60FPS in all of the latest games with a few adjustments to in-game details. You can hit high FPS in esports titles if you had a 1080p 120-165Hz panel for games like Valorant, Apex Legends and Call of Duty with ease on the RTX 3060 at 1080p.

Benchmarks - 1440p

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla is the latest game to be inserted into our benchmark suite, with Ubisoft Montreal using its AnvilNext engine to power the game. It scales really well across the cards, and has some surprising performance benefits with AMD's new Big Navi GPUs.

You can buy Assassins Creed: Valhalla at Amazon.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is a sequel to the popular Shadow of Mordor, which was powered by the Lithtech engine. When cranked up to maximum detail, it will chew through your GPU and its VRAM like it's nothing.

You can buy Middle-earth: Shadow of War at Amazon.

Metro Exodus is one of the hardest tests that our graphics cards have to go through, with 4A Games' latest creation being one of the best looking games on the market. It is a serious test that pushes GPUs to their limits, and also features RTX technologies like DLSS.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one of the latest games to join our graphics card benchmark lineup, with the game built using the Foundation engine as a base, the same engine in Rise of the Tomb Raider. Eidos Montreal R&D department made lots of changes to the engine during the development of Shadow of the Tomb Raider to make it one of the best-looking games out right now.

1440p Benchmark Performance Thoughts

1440p 60FPS gaming is also achievable for the GeForce RTX 3060 depending on the game, but if you're looking to game on something like Call of Duty, etc then you're going to need to dial down some settings to drive over 100FPS. Thankfully you've got the Ampere-powered DLSS technology here which will also help out at 1440p.

Benchmarks - 4K

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla is the latest game to be inserted into our benchmark suite, with Ubisoft Montreal using its AnvilNext engine to power the game. It scales really well across the cards, and has some surprising performance benefits with AMD's new Big Navi GPUs.

You can buy Assassins Creed: Valhalla at Amazon.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is a sequel to the popular Shadow of Mordor, which was powered by the Lithtech engine. When cranked up to maximum detail, it will chew through your GPU and its VRAM like it's nothing.

You can buy Middle-earth: Shadow of War at Amazon.

Metro Exodus is one of the hardest tests that our graphics cards have to go through, with 4A Games' latest creation being one of the best looking games on the market. It is a serious test that pushes GPUs to their limits, and also features RTX technologies like DLSS.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one of the latest games to join our graphics card benchmark lineup, with the game built using the Foundation engine as a base, the same engine in Rise of the Tomb Raider. Eidos Montreal R&D department made lots of changes to the engine during the development of Shadow of the Tomb Raider to make it one of the best-looking games out right now.

4K Benchmark Performance Thoughts

I don't recommend the GeForce RTX 3060 for 4K gaming but depending on the game you can hit 30FPS with Ultra detail and even 60FPS with Ultra detail. Enabling DLSS in games that support it -- Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War for example, lets you get much closer to 4K on a mid-range card -- if you want to, that is.

Overclocking

Out of the box the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC BLACK GAMING graphics card runs at 1890MHz and running at around 68C while the fans were cranked up (default fan profile) up to 75% and around 2100RPM.

The maximum OC that I could squeeze from the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC BLACK GAMING graphics card saw me tapping out at 2100MHz while the fans @ 100% (3300RPM) have the GPU temps at 63C.

Power Consumption & Temps

GPU temps are solid on the smaller EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC BLACK GAMING graphics card, with load temps of 66-68C during benchmarking and gaming and 63C with the card manually overclocked and the fans cranked up to 100%.

Power consumption is virtually identical to all of the other custom GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards with 260W total system power consumption.

What's Hot, What's Not

What's Hot

• Teeny tiny size, powerhouse RTX 3060 performance: Seriously, the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC BLACK GAMING graphics card is nice and small and still packs that powerhouse RTX 3060 performance. RTX ray tracing, DLSS, and so much more on Ampere in this small, petite size. I love it. It's different to the other custom RTX 3060 graphics cards.
• Did I mention it's small? Yeah it's super small and that is awesome, it doesn't run incredibly hot in its small size nor does it make a huge racket of noise. The size makes it look deceiving in your PC, given how it battles previous-gen flagship GPUs.
• A single 8-pin PCIe power connector: I don't think a GeForce RTX 3060 should require anything more than a single 8-pin PCIe power connector unless its warrantied. Very glad EVGA didn't do that here, which will allow their GeForce RTX 3060 XC BLACK GAMING to fit into many more gaming PCs -- big and small, without requiring lots of PSU grunt.

• 12GB of GDDR6 memory: This is a great amount of memory to have for the $329 MSRP that NVIDIA has set, but you won't find the card for that price unfortunately. Still, it's great to see mid-range cards with much more VRAM. Hopefully this means the Ampere refresh RTX 3070 has 16GB of GDDR6 memory and the Ampere refresh of the RTX 3080 has 20GB of GDDR6X memory.
• Great HTPC graphics card: If you want all of the new Ampere GPU features that include HDMI 2.1 connectivity for high-res, high refresh rate monitors (4K 120Hz, etc) for a HTPC gaming rig then the GeForce RTX 3060 is a great buy. There's also AV1 decode abilities here, too.

What's Not

• No price: Who knows what price you're going to see on the Inno3D GeForce RTX 3060 iCHILL X3 RED when you see it -- but it could be in the $500 range versus the $329 MSRP from NVIDIA and the usual 10-20% on top for a tuned custom variant.
• Impossible to find: Good luck trying to find it.
• 12GB of GDDR6 memory: This is going to be confusing to at least some people... the cheapest Ampere graphics card in the GeForce RTX 3060 has 12GB of GDDR6 meanwhile the flagship GeForce RTX 3080 has 10GB of GDDR6X memory and the GeForce RTX 3070 with 8GB of GDDR6.

Final Thoughts

EVGA has one of my favorite custom GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards now with its RTX 3060 XC BLACK GAMING, with its small size packing potent gaming performance for 1080p and 1440p gamers.

The hard thing is that the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a better card than the GeForce RTX 3060, but they're both impossible to find. You're looking at around $70-$100 more at MSRP levels for the RTX 3060 Ti over the RTX 3060, but if you are dead set on getting the RTX 3060 then the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC BLACK GAMING is a pocket rocket GPU beast.

AMD has its new Navi 22-powered Radeon RX 6700 XT and a flurry of custom Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards all on the way, literally as I type they're in the air and on their way to me and other reviewers, influencers and YouTubers.

The single 8-pin PCIe power connector and tiny mITX size make the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC BLACK GAMING an easy recommendation from me, the only thing I would recommend is that if you were going to get this card -- to get the slightly higher-end version with the backplate (EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 - 12G-P5-3657-KR = backplate) while (EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 - 12G-P5-3655-KR is the card I have reviewed here).