Nvidia's Cheapest RTX GPU - RTX 3050 Review

**The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050: A Cut-Down Card with a Lower Price Tag**

It's been years since we've seen a new generation of graphics cards, and it's interesting to see how the performance has changed over time. The RTX 3050 is one such card that was released several years ago, but its specs are still competitive with modern-day GPUs. While it may not be a top-of-the-line card by any means, it's still capable of delivering a smooth gaming experience at 1080p resolution.

When it comes to pricing, the RTX 3050 is expected to sell for around $300 to $350, which makes it comparable in price to a 3-year-old RTX 2060. This is quite an impressive feat, considering that modern GPUs have generally gotten slower and more cut-down over time. For example, when running Doom Eternal, the RTX 3050 is only about 25% slower than the newer RTX 3060. In Witcher 3, however, the gap widens even further, with the RTX 3050 being around 30% slower than the 3060.

Despite its limitations, the RTX 3050 can still deliver a capable gaming experience at high quality settings. However, it's essential to weigh up the performance difference and price tag in your region before making a purchasing decision. If you're on a tighter budget or play less demanding games, the RTX 3050 might be a suitable option for you.

**AMD's RX 6600: A Worthwhile Alternative?**

Another GPU worth considering is AMD's RX 6600, which is listed for around $480 on New Egg. While this may seem like a lot of money, the RX 6600 offers noticeable performance improvements over the RTX 3050. The recommended pairing for the RX 6600 would be similar to that of the RTX 3050: an Intel Core i3-1200f and a lower-end GPU, such as the GTX 1660 Super.

When paired with the Intel i3-1200f, the RX 6600 delivers smooth performance in games like Apex Legends and Valorant at lower quality settings. The card's 8 GB of VRAM also means that you can max out textures at 1080p without sacrificing too much image quality. However, it's essential to note that enabling features like RTX Tracing and DLSS may not be the best idea on this GPU, as it will significantly impact performance.

**Power Consumption and Cooling**

One of the most significant advantages of the RTX 3050 is its power consumption, which sits around 130W. This makes it an ideal choice for systems with limited power supply units (PSUs). The clock speed of the RTX 3050 is also relatively high, at around 1830 MHz.

When it comes to cooling, a dual-fan cooler design would be sufficient for this GPU. A triple-fan cooler design is unnecessary and may even be overkill. This is because the RTX 3050 generates relatively moderate temperatures, considering its power consumption.

**Conclusion**

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 is an interesting addition to the modern graphics card landscape. While it may not be a top-tier card, its competitive pricing makes it a viable option for those on a budget. AMD's RX 6600 offers improved performance and might be worth considering, but ultimately, the decision depends on your specific needs and region.

When making a purchasing decision, it's crucial to weigh up the performance difference and price tag. If you're willing to sacrifice some performance for the sake of affordability, the RTX 3050 is an acceptable choice. However, if you need more powerful graphics capabilities, there are other options available in your region that may be worth considering.

**Launch Date and Pricing**

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 will launch soon, so keep an eye out for its availability in your region. As usual, the pricing will determine its value proposition. If it can land at the $300 MSRP mark, the RTX 3050 becomes a more attractive option.

In conclusion, the RTX 3050 is an interesting GPU that offers competitive performance and affordability. While it may not be the most powerful card on the market, its pricing makes it a viable choice for those on a budget. We'll have to wait and see how it performs in real-world gaming scenarios and what the final pricing will look like.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso both AMD and Nvidia are in a position right now where they don't really need to try when it comes to making a good GPU right the GPU Market is so easy for them at the moment pretty much anything will sell uh this is a great example of that this is the new RTX 3050 from Nvidia it is the cheapest RTX 30 series card in their lineup yet and you know what at $250 if you can actually buy it at that price it's actually not too bad of a GPU considering what your other options are which is pretty much nothing it can power 1080p gaming pretty confidently and it seems like a good pairing with a 144hz monitor but it is very cut down from the other RTX 30 series gpus in fact it's packing almost 30% less cicor than the RTX 3060 and has a much weaker memory spec as well all that while only being $80 or 24% cheaper on paper but hopefully it is a lot cheaper in reality since you can't actually buy the 3060 at its $330 MSRP total board power for the 3050 lands us at 130 W so pretty lightweight GPU powering this thing will be no problem and the card that we have here uses a single 8 Pin power connector this is also the first 50 class GPU from Nvidia to pack the RTX naming with rt cores and tentacles for things like Ray tracing and dlss now whether that's actually worth considering we'll come back to in a moment but something that I do really want to make clear before we jump into the side-by-side comparisons is that this doesn't feel like a 50 class GPU at all all I mean when you take a look at the GTX 1650 and the GTX 1650 super those gpus launched at $150 and you could actually buy them at those prices this on the other hand is more comparable to a GTX 1660 super which you know starting at $250 and again that represents best case we all know that that is more realistically going to be $300 to $350 at least and at that point you comparing it to an RTX 2060 but let's start off here in an Ideal World if you can actually buy the TX 350 for $250 what does that look like in terms of price to Performance well here in Horizon zero Dawn at 1080p we have the GTX 1060 on the left the 1660 super in the middle and then the RTX 3050 all of these gpus have msrps right around $250 so as we can see there is a big jump in performance between the 1060 and the 1660 super we go from barely being able to manage 60 FPS here at high settings to driving that pretty comfortably in the end there's a about a 35% performance uplift between those two gpus then we upgrade to the 3050 and it's only a few per faster at best keep in mind the 1660 super is over 2 years old now in GTA 5 we see pretty much the same thing big difference between the 1060 and the 1660 in terms of what performance you're getting at the $250 Mark and yes those gpus actually sold for $250 pretty consistently the 3050 and the 1660 super though don't look too different unfortunately now though you can't actually buy the 1660 super for $250 so with that in mind the RTX 3050 is a little bit more tolerable and let me be totally clear this is horrible progress from Nvidia they could do a lot better than this knowing how powerful the amp architecture actually is but from a consumer's perspective you don't have many other options at this price now if the RTX 3050 actually ends up selling north of $300 and in that case should be compared to something like the 2060 you can see how that comparison pans out in fact if you bought an RTX 2060 when it launched 3 years ago which wasn't a super strong card by any means you'd still be beating what is possible to buy today in terms of performance at the same price so let's just all take that in for a second I think we'd all agree that the RTX 3050 will realistically sell for about $300 to $350 plus which then prices it the same as the 3-year-old RTX 2060 if that's the case as you can see here nvidia's gpus have actually got slower we can also see just how cut down the 3050 is compared to the 3060 on average the 3050 is around 25% slower here in Doom maternal then in Witcher 3 it's even worse here the 3050 is 30% slower on average sure it can still drive a capable 1080p gaming experience with high quality settings but man that is a tough pill to swallow another GPU that we should probably throw into the mix is amd's rx 6600 this is a GPU that's currently listed for about $480 $ on New Egg which is pretty appalling but depending on what RTX 3050 pricing comes out to this is a GPU that you might want to consider as well performance is a noticeable jump over the RTX 3050 so the recommendation here as usual is to weigh up how much the price difference is in your particular region versus the performance difference as well now if it makes it a little bit easier if the 3050 actually comes in at under $300 it's a GPU that will get the job done if you're on a tighter budget if you play easier to run games and of course if you have no other options like a good secondhand GPU from a friend for competitive Esports style games that are a lot easier to run it does have acceptable performance so out of curiosity I paired it with the Intel I3 1200f and wanted to see what the experience was like with lower quality settings in games like Apex and valerant and yeah actually not too bad at all very smooth experience which would make for a great pair alongside a 144 HZ or even 240 HZ monitor also the 8 GB of vram means that you can pretty much max out textures at 1080p in any game and still get something that looks pretty good so I3 and 3050 definitely a viable pair for Esports style games with low settings and again hopefully the pricing of the 3050 lands at something reasonable now the 3050 it is an RTX card which means that it is equipped with rate tracing and dealss features but there are a couple of things to note here firstly enabling R tracing will cost you quite a bit of performance on such a low-end card and enabling dlss at such low resol resolutions means that your actual rendering resolution is quite low now this isn't a problem at high resolutions like 1440p and 4K but if you're enabling dlss at 1080p then the end result will typically be quite a bit soft so just keep that in mind uh no doubt useful features I would consider it a nice to have kind of feature set on a low-end GPU for the right games but it is a lot more useful at higher resolutions and on more powerful hardware and then a quick look at Power clock speed and temperatures uh the 350 will run quite in pretty much any system out there it is a really lightweight GPU power consumption sits right around 130 W with the clock speed at about 1830 MHz so definitely no point here opting for a beefy triple fan cooler design I would just recommend picking up the most affordable dual fan cool design that is available so that's pretty much all I have to say about the RTX 3050 from Nvidia as usual gpus keep getting slower keep getting more cut down and there is just less reason for NVIDIA and AMD for that matter to release gpus that are actually impressive uh without seeing the pricing online it's just not worth me going back and forth with you guys on what this is worth it against you know radon cards 3060 just not worth it without seeing the pricing online so as usual I would recommend making an educated decision based off of the pricing and the other cards in your region again at the $250 MSRP if it can actually launch at that price it is an acceptable GPU I certainly don't want to make anyone feel bad for purchasing it because you don't really have a lot of other options but otherwise you know only being a few per faster than a GTX 1660 super at the same MSRP I think that really speaks for itself so I will leave it link down below we'll be launching tomorrow so keep an eye out for it as always a huge thanks for watching and I will see you all in the next oneso both AMD and Nvidia are in a position right now where they don't really need to try when it comes to making a good GPU right the GPU Market is so easy for them at the moment pretty much anything will sell uh this is a great example of that this is the new RTX 3050 from Nvidia it is the cheapest RTX 30 series card in their lineup yet and you know what at $250 if you can actually buy it at that price it's actually not too bad of a GPU considering what your other options are which is pretty much nothing it can power 1080p gaming pretty confidently and it seems like a good pairing with a 144hz monitor but it is very cut down from the other RTX 30 series gpus in fact it's packing almost 30% less cicor than the RTX 3060 and has a much weaker memory spec as well all that while only being $80 or 24% cheaper on paper but hopefully it is a lot cheaper in reality since you can't actually buy the 3060 at its $330 MSRP total board power for the 3050 lands us at 130 W so pretty lightweight GPU powering this thing will be no problem and the card that we have here uses a single 8 Pin power connector this is also the first 50 class GPU from Nvidia to pack the RTX naming with rt cores and tentacles for things like Ray tracing and dlss now whether that's actually worth considering we'll come back to in a moment but something that I do really want to make clear before we jump into the side-by-side comparisons is that this doesn't feel like a 50 class GPU at all all I mean when you take a look at the GTX 1650 and the GTX 1650 super those gpus launched at $150 and you could actually buy them at those prices this on the other hand is more comparable to a GTX 1660 super which you know starting at $250 and again that represents best case we all know that that is more realistically going to be $300 to $350 at least and at that point you comparing it to an RTX 2060 but let's start off here in an Ideal World if you can actually buy the TX 350 for $250 what does that look like in terms of price to Performance well here in Horizon zero Dawn at 1080p we have the GTX 1060 on the left the 1660 super in the middle and then the RTX 3050 all of these gpus have msrps right around $250 so as we can see there is a big jump in performance between the 1060 and the 1660 super we go from barely being able to manage 60 FPS here at high settings to driving that pretty comfortably in the end there's a about a 35% performance uplift between those two gpus then we upgrade to the 3050 and it's only a few per faster at best keep in mind the 1660 super is over 2 years old now in GTA 5 we see pretty much the same thing big difference between the 1060 and the 1660 in terms of what performance you're getting at the $250 Mark and yes those gpus actually sold for $250 pretty consistently the 3050 and the 1660 super though don't look too different unfortunately now though you can't actually buy the 1660 super for $250 so with that in mind the RTX 3050 is a little bit more tolerable and let me be totally clear this is horrible progress from Nvidia they could do a lot better than this knowing how powerful the amp architecture actually is but from a consumer's perspective you don't have many other options at this price now if the RTX 3050 actually ends up selling north of $300 and in that case should be compared to something like the 2060 you can see how that comparison pans out in fact if you bought an RTX 2060 when it launched 3 years ago which wasn't a super strong card by any means you'd still be beating what is possible to buy today in terms of performance at the same price so let's just all take that in for a second I think we'd all agree that the RTX 3050 will realistically sell for about $300 to $350 plus which then prices it the same as the 3-year-old RTX 2060 if that's the case as you can see here nvidia's gpus have actually got slower we can also see just how cut down the 3050 is compared to the 3060 on average the 3050 is around 25% slower here in Doom maternal then in Witcher 3 it's even worse here the 3050 is 30% slower on average sure it can still drive a capable 1080p gaming experience with high quality settings but man that is a tough pill to swallow another GPU that we should probably throw into the mix is amd's rx 6600 this is a GPU that's currently listed for about $480 $ on New Egg which is pretty appalling but depending on what RTX 3050 pricing comes out to this is a GPU that you might want to consider as well performance is a noticeable jump over the RTX 3050 so the recommendation here as usual is to weigh up how much the price difference is in your particular region versus the performance difference as well now if it makes it a little bit easier if the 3050 actually comes in at under $300 it's a GPU that will get the job done if you're on a tighter budget if you play easier to run games and of course if you have no other options like a good secondhand GPU from a friend for competitive Esports style games that are a lot easier to run it does have acceptable performance so out of curiosity I paired it with the Intel I3 1200f and wanted to see what the experience was like with lower quality settings in games like Apex and valerant and yeah actually not too bad at all very smooth experience which would make for a great pair alongside a 144 HZ or even 240 HZ monitor also the 8 GB of vram means that you can pretty much max out textures at 1080p in any game and still get something that looks pretty good so I3 and 3050 definitely a viable pair for Esports style games with low settings and again hopefully the pricing of the 3050 lands at something reasonable now the 3050 it is an RTX card which means that it is equipped with rate tracing and dealss features but there are a couple of things to note here firstly enabling R tracing will cost you quite a bit of performance on such a low-end card and enabling dlss at such low resol resolutions means that your actual rendering resolution is quite low now this isn't a problem at high resolutions like 1440p and 4K but if you're enabling dlss at 1080p then the end result will typically be quite a bit soft so just keep that in mind uh no doubt useful features I would consider it a nice to have kind of feature set on a low-end GPU for the right games but it is a lot more useful at higher resolutions and on more powerful hardware and then a quick look at Power clock speed and temperatures uh the 350 will run quite in pretty much any system out there it is a really lightweight GPU power consumption sits right around 130 W with the clock speed at about 1830 MHz so definitely no point here opting for a beefy triple fan cooler design I would just recommend picking up the most affordable dual fan cool design that is available so that's pretty much all I have to say about the RTX 3050 from Nvidia as usual gpus keep getting slower keep getting more cut down and there is just less reason for NVIDIA and AMD for that matter to release gpus that are actually impressive uh without seeing the pricing online it's just not worth me going back and forth with you guys on what this is worth it against you know radon cards 3060 just not worth it without seeing the pricing online so as usual I would recommend making an educated decision based off of the pricing and the other cards in your region again at the $250 MSRP if it can actually launch at that price it is an acceptable GPU I certainly don't want to make anyone feel bad for purchasing it because you don't really have a lot of other options but otherwise you know only being a few per faster than a GTX 1660 super at the same MSRP I think that really speaks for itself so I will leave it link down below we'll be launching tomorrow so keep an eye out for it as always a huge thanks for watching and I will see you all in the next one\n"