The Nvidia RTX 3060 will officially launch this weekend, February 25 at 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time to be exact. However, the card has been spotted early on at online stores around the country, so it will come as no surprise to hear that people are rushing to get their hands on one.

According to VideoCardz, a seller named Artem was selling three Gigabyte Eagle RTX 3060 cards on Onliner in Belarus over the weekend. The sales page has since disappeared and now shows a 404, but there is no doubt that these cards sold for the listed price of $1,080 (in US dollars) each. That is, if they were not withdrawn beforehand.

What is really interesting about this listing is that these sales images clearly show the serial numbers. This makes it easy for Gigabyte to track down the cards and pinpoint exactly where they slipped off the truck. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before someone gets the sack.

Despite the supposedly unhackable mining limiters imposed by Nvidia, people seem eager to get their hands on these cards. Some will have taken this as an open invitation to try to disable them. Nevertheless, it is quite possible to do crypto mining with these low-end cards and make a small profit, even if the hash rate is limited to half.

Perhaps these early resellers are miners looking for a way to dispose of less useful cards and make a healthy profit.

The RTX 3060 is also likely to be equally popular with those looking for a good old fashioned gaming experience. With a base configuration that includes 12GB of VRAM and a boost clock of 1.78GHz (possibly over 2GHz in some cases), these cards look like little beasts waiting to be unleashed.

All of this means that there will be a lot of interest in the least expensive Ampere generation graphics cards to date. If you have a chance to pick up an RTX 3060 on Thursday, get your clicking fingers ready.

Utterly shameless.