No, that headline isn’t clickbait: in the midst of a graphics card market that continues to be an absolute disaster, ASUS is out here pitching a four-year-old GPU as “the best budget graphics card we offer in 2025 for gamers who prefer NVIDIA GPUs.” That kind of statement would be a joke coming from a site like ours, but coming straight from ASUS? It’s just another chalk mark in the “clown world” column.
So why is ASUS posting this? Is the company desperately trying to offload a stockpile of old GA106 GPUs? Maybe, but it’s probably just because the current generation of budget cards is embarrassing. If you’re looking for an upgrade, your choices are either grossly overpaying for the latest or even last-gen hardware, settling for something that’s functionally even worse than what was available in 2021, or—depressingly—agreeing with ASUS that the RTX 3060 is actually kind of an acceptable deal.
NVIDIA’s latest offerings—the GeForce RTX 50 Series based on Blackwell—are awesome… if you enjoy spending literal fistfuls of hundred-dollar bills on a graphics card after fighting scalpers for the privilege. AMD’s next-gen RDNA 4 Radeon cards are just around the corner, but we have no idea if they’ll actually shake up the market or if they’ll also be stuck in pricing purgatory. That leaves the midrange and budget space in a weird limbo where an RTX 3060, a GPU from 2021, is somehow a logical purchase in 2025.
You don’t even really have a lot of other options that make any sense in the $300 price range, because the market is truly apocalyptic right now. The GeForce RTX 4060 still starts at $300, but enjoy paying that for 8GB of RAM on a paltry 128-bit bus. To get a faster RTX 4060 Ti, you’re looking at a single listing for $400 before the prices climb to $590, while the 16GB version is going for $770 right now. Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT cards are priced similarly, and although Radeon RX 7600 cards start at $260, they again only have 8GB of RAM; the faster 16GB variant will cost you $350 at a minimum.
Don’t look to Intel to save you from budget GPU hell, either, because the Arc B570 and Arc B580 cards are in short supply. What few models are available are largely, you guessed it: scalped. We effusively praised the Arc B580 for its value proposition at $250; at nearly $400 it’s considerably less compelling (though still arguably a better buy than an RTX 4060 Ti with 8GB of RAM.)
ASUS is banking on the idea that if you’re still rocking a GTX 1650, or god forbid, an old GTX 1060, you’ll see the RTX 3060 as a big step up—and, well, ASUS isn’t wrong. It still handles 1080p gaming well, it can handle Ultra settings thanks to its big 12GB of RAM, and it gets a boost from DLSS, including the new Transformer-based DLSS 4. Perhaps best of all, it isn’t going to completely kneecap your system with power and cooling demands, and it will use the same 8-pin connectors your power supply already has.
So here we are, sadly nodding along as ASUS tells us to buy a graphics card that launched in the first year of the previous U.S. presidency. It’s absurd, but it’s also kind of true. If you need a GPU and you’re shopping in the $300 range, the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB might just be a good option. Welcome back to the future.