Manli announces a new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 variant with 8 GB VRAM

Nvidia has made its Ampere lineup even more confusing by launching yet another questionably-specced SKU seemingly out of nowhere. The GeForce RTX 3060 8 GB showed up alongside the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti with GDDR6X memory and a GA102-powered GeForce RTX 3070 Ti in Nvidia's drivers a few days ago. Now, Manli has unveiled the GeForce RTX 3060 8 GB for an unspecified price.

Manli hasn't confirmed which GPU the GeForce RTX 3060 8 GB uses, but it is likely a GA106. It does, however, reduce the memory bus to 128-bit (from 192-bit) to account for the lower video memory. The graphics card uses the same 15 Gbps GDDR6 modules as the GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB resulting in a total memory bandwidth of 240 GB/s. Everything else, including base/boost clocks (1,320/1,777 MHz) and CUDA cores (3,584), are identical across both SKUs.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 8 GB is absent from Nvidia's official website, but it shouldn't be long before a listing shows up. Videocardz reports that Manli and Asus are the only OEMs to offer the mid-ranger in such a configuration. Based on its spec sheet, the GeForce RTX 3060 8 GB would have been better off as the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, primarily because the plain GeForce RTX 3050 uses a GA106 GPU with 2,560 CUDA cores and 8 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 VRAM on a 128-bit memory bus.

With the GeForce RTX 3060 8 GB's arrival, Nvidia has made it abundantly clear that Ampere cards are here to stay. An affordable Ada Lovelace graphics card is unlikely to arrive anytime soon. The situation isn't any different on the other side. AMD plans to launch only two high-end Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards on November 3, essentially forcing gamers on a budget to choose between Ampere or RDNA 2.

Buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 on Amazon