A new leak has surfaced, revealing the existence of an Nvidia RTX 3060 with a fully enabled GA106 GPU that never made it to market. This SKU, identified as PG190 SKU 50, was one of the several specs for the GPU that were shared among board partners before its official launch in January 2021.
Before the release of the RTX 3060, some rumours claimed that Nvidia's graphics card would come with a fully enabled GA106 GPU. However, that wasn't the case, as the card was released in 2021 with 3,584 CUDA cores. Nonetheless, a recently discovered BIOS found by Jiacheng Liu (via VideoCardz) for the full GA106 GPU with 3840 CUDA cores has been traced back to MSI, suggesting that this spec was indeed planned at some point during the card's development.
“RTX 3060 Super”
GA106-400-A1
Full 3840 shaders, 12GB, 10DE-2501. pic.twitter.com/JG4ZmIJy0n— Jiacheng Liu (@unnatural__log) April 17, 2023
Besides the increased CUDA core count, the pictures also show higher GPU clock speeds. According to GPU-Z, the base clock is 1627 MHz, a 300MHz boost over the RTX 3060's 1320 MHz. The boost clock for the proposed SKU is also higher, set at 1875 MHz versus the original RTX 3060's 1777 MHz. The memory specs, however, are almost the same, with the only difference being the slightly lower memory clock at 14.8 Gbps.
It's important to note that this BIOS is dated December 16th, 2020, so don't expect to see this card getting released, especially considering that we are likely to see the RTX 4060 this year.
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KitGuru says: While it's always intriguing to see what could have been, the discovery of this BIOS for the unreleased RTX 3060 SKU serves as a reminder that not all GPU rumours are just speculation. Some of these leaks are indeed based on actual BIOS information from the manufacturer.