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 Westmere X 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 Display Port 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. Thermals aren't any better either, with the hotspot pushing past 90 degrees Celsius during testing since the cooler is little more than a thin metal shroud with no fin stack.

It's a neat trick on paper, but the execution here suggests it's more proof of concept than a usable product.