Nvidia originally launched the GeForce RTX 3060 (12GB) in early 2021 with a 170W TDP and reissued it about two months ago amid an ongoing component crisis. A Bilibili channel called WestmereX has now shown an unusual variant of the card that has been modified to run entirely off the power supplied by a PCIe x16 slot, which can provide up to 75W, eliminating the need for any 6- or 8-pin power connectors.
The card is a single-slot, low-profile design with a blower-style cooler roughly the size of a smartphone, offering only one HDMI and one DisplayPort output. Both Tom's Hardware and Wccftech report that a teardown revealed sparse internal construction: there is no fin stack, no backplate, and the memory chips have no thermal pads or paste, with the metal shroud making direct contact with the core for cooling.
According to the sources, the RTX 3060 can normally be power-limited down to about 100W through undervolting without major issues, but reaching 75W required a shunt mod — altering the power-sensing resistor near the PCIe interface — to trick the card into operating within the slot's limited power budget. Wccftech notes that GPU-Z reported figures of nearly 145W board power draw and 176W chip power draw, but cautions these numbers are unreliable since the modification altered the power-sensing circuitry.
Performance was significantly affected. Despite being rated for boost clocks around 1,770-1,777 MHz, the modified card could barely sustain clocks above 900 MHz. In 3DMark Time Spy, it scored just 4,821 points, compared to over 9,000 for a standard RTX 3060 — a result both outlets note is lower than scores typically produced by older budget cards like the AMD RX 580 and Nvidia GTX 1060.
Both sources also report that the GPU hotspot temperature exceeded 90 degrees Celsius during testing, indicating the cooler struggled even with the reduced power budget, suggesting the card suffered from significant thermal throttling on top of its power constraints.
Tom's Hardware notes that while an argument could be made for using an older Ampere GPU in compact, low-power systems, mini PCs with integrated graphics of similar or better performance are now available in 2026. Wccftech, however, suggests the card could still serve as an option for ultra-compact systems with space constraints where no external power connectors are available for a GPU.