Given renewed competition, a refresh of NVIDIA’s lower-end cards might makes sense after all.
There have been rumors going around about an Ampere refresh for a long time now. The RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti launched some nine months after the original RTX 3000 models, and could be considered a “refresh” of sorts. However, the original rumors were for a full-series refresh that has never materialized.
Even after the launch of the RTX 4080, NVIDIA still isn’t going to have anything from the new architecture to serve the overwhelming majority of the market, which is to say the space that exists under $900. The RTX 3060 is the most popular chip in the Ampere family, and it’s directly in the sights of Intel with its Arc Alchemist GPUs.
There’s one site that lists the card—same model number—without that picture, and it’s Insight. Notably, Insight also lists the card as a standard GeForce RTX 3060 model with 12GB of GDDR6 memory. Disappointing as it may be, we suspect that the “X” in the other listings is probably just a typo on Lenovo’s part. Further working against the idea of an upgraded 3060 model is the fact that this isn’t a new card.
