China's Single-Slot RTX 3060 Runs Off PCIe Power Alone, Loses to a GTX 1060

Someone in China has taken the GeForce RTX 3060 and stripped it down to run entirely off the PCIe slot, with no 6-pin or 8-pin connector in sight. A Bilibili creator going by WestmereX shared the card, first spotted by UNIKO's Hardware, showing a single-slot, low-profile design about the size of a smartphone, with just one HDMI and one DisplayPort output. The card uses a blower-style cooler with a single fan that's pushing hot air out the back. The shroud itself is a thin metal sheet handling all the heat dissipation, with no fin stack, no backplate, and only a basic heatsink in the middle.

The PCIe slot tops out at 75 W, well under the RTX 3060's stock 170 W TDP, so apparently getting there required a shunt mod to fool the card's power-sensing circuit into accepting the lower limit. The results aren't pretty at all. Clock speeds barely creep past 900 MHz despite a rated 1,777 MHz boost, and the card posted just 4,821 points in 3DMark Time Spy. That's well behind the roughly 9,000 a standard RTX 3060 manages, and even below older cards like the GTX 1060 and RX 580. Read full story