Nvidia's RTX 3060 cards could launch sooner than expected as suggested by fresh EEC certification files from Palit

Rumors regarding the production of Nvidia’s RTX 3060 / RTX 3050 GPUs started circulating back in early July this year, and, thanks to a recent EEC filing submitted by Palit, we now have confirmation that the RTX 3060 is indeed one of the lower-end cards from the new Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3000-series.

Palit’s certification files include no less than 171 different GPU models, but, as Videocardz suggests, it is highly likely that not all of these are going to make it to the market. Just like the previous MSI certification files from a few days ago, the Palit ones include RTX 3090, RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 variants plus quite a few RTX 3060 products. For some reason, the number of RTX 3070 products is way higher than any other, and the RTX 3060 batch is second in this regard.

There are three main groups of SKUs on top of the regular 30xx denominations and these include T, S and H suffixes. TechRadar is suggesting that T could stand for Ti and S for Super, while the H may indicate cards compatible with hydro cooling blocks. However, the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 models appear to have SKUs mixing all three suffixes, so that theory does not seem to be valid.

Regardless of what these suffixes mean, the inclusion of the RTX 3060 cards together with the higher-end models may suggest that these variants could launch sooner than expected. Judging by Nvidia’s previous release schedules, the xx60 cards usually get launched several months after the xx70 and xx80 cards, but Palit’s early EEC filings could mean that the RTX 3060 cards may launch in late 2020 instead of early 2021. This makes sense considering that AMD plans to launch the Big Navi RDNA2 GPUs together with the Navi 22 mid-rangers and the refreshed Navi 10 lower-end cards in October-November this year.