Chinese OEM manufacturers came across a great idea of selling mobile GPUs in the form of desktop GPUs. BullsLab recently tested the 3060M GPU, or rather a mobile GPU cosplaying as its desktop variant. In the specifications department, this GPU features 6 GB of VRAM as compared to the 3060’s 12 GB of VRAM. Surprisingly, the Cuda core count is higher as the ‘mobile’ variant ships with 3840 cores as compared to the 3584 available on the desktop SKU. And yes, you will need an external power connection because the 3060M has a TDP of 115W, however, the variant that was benchmarked consumed only 80W of power performing better than the laptop’s 105W variant. You can thank better cooling available on PCs for that. A common question will arise, ‘Where is the 3060M?’. Well, this GPU was only launched to facilitate the need of miners because the crypto community once again bamboozled NVIDIA as laptop GPUs never had an LHR limit. This gave birth to the now ‘3060M‘. The driver being used is the 512.15 which is relatively old as compared to the newer ones. Better yet, there is no official support from NVIDIA for these GPUs so you can say they were illegally manufactered and are still being sold but NVIDIA doesn’t seem to bat an eye. To everyone’s surprise, the 3060M in a desktop performs just 1.5% worse than the actual 3060. It goes to show that undervolting really does help because even after using nearly 100W less, the 3060M has just a 1.5% decrement in performance metrics.
