This free Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 seems too good to be true, and it probably is

A Redditor scored a free Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics card via a Temu sign up offer, but the chances of it being a scam are very high indeed.

Temu, the Chinese mega marketplace, already has a reputation for using heavily discounted deals to attract new customers, but what about an entirely free Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060? One lucky Reddit user is claiming they grabbed just such a free Nvidia graphics card in a Temu sign-up deal, but before you rush to Temu yourself, there are a number of huge red flags that make this story much less clear cut.

It’s time for a big dollop of realism to ruin a potentially incredible story. The best graphics cards from Nvidia can be very expensive, so it’s a wild west out there if you’re hunting for bargains. We’ve seen plenty of fake or misleading GPUs that aren’t what they seem littering some Chinese e-commerce sites. This Redditor might have been lucky, but it’s also very possible that they’ve scored a fake.

Let’s talk through what we know so far. User LudM shared in their now-deleted original post a week ago that they’d seen a Temu giveaway for a free RTX 3060 a few days prior from a brand called Seijishi. Despite some healthy doubt, they signed up for the deal, received a tracking number, and it all seemed to be going ahead.

Just a week later, the OP confirmed that they’d received the mysterious graphics card in a new, updated Reddit post. The brand isn’t one with which we’re familiar and there’s an immediate red flag that we can see on the box itself. While the box does mention GeForce RTX, there’s no sign of the RTX 3060 model number, outside of an easily-applicable sticker on the top. Could this all be a deception, straight from a sketchy manufacturer?

A quick inspection of the card itself confirms that it looks like a graphics card of about the right size to be an RTX 3060. It has the right size heatsink and fans, with a dual-slot overall thickness – it’s not a tiny, basic card such as an Nvidia GT 1030 just labelled as an RTX 3060.

It also has one DisplayPort and two HDMI ports for connections and there’s an eight-pin PCIe power connector on the top edge of the card, all of which would again be standard for an RTX 3060. There are also some reasonably well-written instructions on how to install it into your PC, which isn’t always a given.

So, it looks like a graphics card, but is it a 3060? Unfortunately, the OP confirms they’ve not tested it themselves, so there’s no way to know if it is legit or not. We’re left with a lot of unanswered questions about this Temu win, but plenty of possibilities. It could be a refurbished model, or a card built by Chinese manufacturers using mobile GPU chips, or it might not even be an RTX 3060 at all.

Best case scenario, this Redditor scored one heck of a bargain on a GPU that’s still great for gaming today. There’s a good chance, however, that this GPU isn’t what it seems, and I’m not sure I’d be willing to place it in my main gaming PC to check, either. Good luck, LudM – you’re probably going to need it.

In the market for a new graphics card yourself? While we’d generally recommend giving Temu a miss in your hunt for one, you might want to check out our Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super review next, where we take a look at the current best all-rounder card for most gamers.