If you want to build a miniature gaming system, you need a miniature graphics card too. Until now, that meant RX 5000 and RTX 2000 cards only, but Nvidia is looking to change that with a range of high-powered, mini-ITX versions of its new RTX 3000 generation. Based on the RTX 3060 GA106-300 GPU core, these cards enjoy support for DLSS and RTX ray tracing, offering performance around that of an RTX 2080 Super, and have 12 GB of GDDR5.
Several third party board partners have announced their versions of the card, with Palit, MSI, and Gainward promising their versions will enjoy 3,584 CUDA cores (including FP32 and INT32), a 1,320MHz base clock and a 1,777MHz boost clock. The memory operates at 15Gbps over a 192-bit bus.
The cards are all single-fan, dual-slot configurations too, so should be relatively quiet. They'll offer the standard RTX 3000 connector configuration too, with three DisplayPort 1.4 connections and a single HDMI 2.1 port.
For those who want a particularly nippy and low-profile cooling solution, it should be possible to attach a small all-in one watercooler to these cards — if you don't mind voiding your warranty — helping to make the most of their performance while operating near silently. There's no guarantee, but NZXT's Kraken G12 could probably be cable tied to it.
It's likely that we'll see overclocked versions of these cards too, opening up even greater performance and further making 4K gaming possible in tiny form factor machines.
