The rising cost of PC parts is getting so bad that Nvidia is reportedly going to start making RTX 3060s again, so people have something to buy in the future while all the new shiny tech gets consumed by the AI industry.
You’ve likely already noticed that in 2025, it became more expensive to build or upgrade a PC. Thanks to hyperscalers and AI-focused tech companies gobbling up PC parts to build datacenters, it’s becoming quite pricey and challenging for your average person to buy PC RAM and graphics cards. Even the prices on prebuilt PCs from companies like HP, Dell, and Asus will increase by 15 to 20 percent, according to PC World. Not great! This will also lead to PC handhelds getting more expensive, and experts expect consoles will undergo price increases too, thanks to growing demand for specific parts. And Nvidia, a company that is making billions from all of this, has a solution to provide PC players with a somewhat affordable GPU in 2026: Start making and selling its old RTX 3060 again.
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rtx3060 Q1 come back… 🥲— hongxing2020 (@hongxing2020) January 5, 2026
As recently reported by reliable Nvidia leaker Hongxing2020 and spotted by Wccftech, Nvidia is seemingly planning to restart production on the RTX 3060 in Q1 of this year. The card first launched in 2021 and is still one of the most popular gaming GPUs around, according to data from Steam.
In 2024, Nvidia began retiring the card as it moved on to the 40 and 50 series of GPUs. However, due to DRAM being rapidly consumed for data centers, it has become harder and more expensive to procure the GDDR7 needed to produce the newer, more powerful RTX 5060. (Sidenote: Basically, every datacenter built or being built will be out of date in the near future, meaning the billions invested in them will be basically a waste!)
So it seems like the plan is for Nvidia to start producing 3060s again, using cheaper, easier-to-acquire components that aren’t top of the line and therefore aren’t being sought after by AI tech giants for their massive datacenters. If that is the case, hopefully Nvidia at least prices the new 3060s at $200 or less, as the only market for these cards will be gamers looking to upgrade a PC from an older GPU to something (somewhat) modern. But greed is a nasty thing and has infected all tech companies, including Nvidia, so I wouldn’t hold my breath on a sub-$200 price point despite the 3060 entering its fifth year in 2026.