This RTX 3060 is £550 with a 700W EVGA power supply at Scan
Or £789 with a 2TB WD Black SN850 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD
I was looking for cheap graphics card earlier today, and the best I found was this deal: an RTX 3060 and a 700W power supply for £550.
That's not super cheap - the RTX 3060 is meant to cost around £300 in a sane world! - but for a friend that wanted both a new power supply and a modern graphics card at a sane price, it does the job nicely. Here's why this Scan bundle is a good deal - and another option that brings the RTX 3060 down to just £440 when you buy it with a 2TB NVMe SSD.
First: why the RTX 3060? Well, this is the most affordable 30-series graphics card on the market, bringing key features like RTX (for ray-tracin') and DLSS (for fps-raisin') to a more mainstream price point. Katharine found that it offered double the performance of the GTX 1060, making it a pretty good shout for anyone that built a mid-range system at least three or four years ago. This particular model is an Asus Dual OC model, which should offer a small performance bump over standard models and a beefier heatsink to keep it cool and quiet.
The power supply is a good one too: an EVGA Bronze-rated unit, with a fixed 24-pin connector and modular cables everywhere else. (You're always going to need a 24-pin connector, so I personally count this as good as a modular power supply!) 700W is a good amount too, allowing you to overclock your CPU and your RTX 3060 and still have some headroom for later upgrades.
Looking at Ebay sales, the RTX 3060 is regularly retailing for between £500 and £580, so picking one up with a £75 power supply for £550 seems like a pretty good deal - especially as you're buying from Scan with a warranty, rather than from a random Ebay seller.
There's another option too, and arguably it's even better. You can also pick up the RTX 3060, this time a Gigabyte Gaming OC model, with a 2TB WD Black SN850 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD for £790. This incredibly fast drive itself sells for £350, so you're essentially paying £440 for the graphics card - again, a very competitive price given that the 3060 is selling for north of £500 on sites like Ebay (and £600 or £700 from many other retailers).
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What do you think of these bundle deals? Let us know in the comments. For me, they're a necessary evil right now - a bit better than buying a full PC in order to get a graphics card, but not as good as being able to get the card itself at retail, but I suppose we'll get there eventually when the chip shortage lessens. Hang in there, team.