GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3050 Gaming OC 8G, 8GB GDDR6, 2x HDMI, 2x DP

The Gigabyte RTX 3050 Gaming OC comes with great looks that combine various shades of gray. It's also one of the few RTX 3050 cards that include a backplate—very nice. Gigabyte's cooler runs at excellent temperatures of 66°C, but is quite loud with 38 dBA. This make it the loudest RTX 3050 tested today, and louder than all competing cards, even from previous generations. I'm surprised that Gigabyte didn't properly optimize their fan curve. It would have been easy to allow a few degrees more with much lower noise levels. Maybe they absolutely wanted to stay below 70°C—for whatever reason. Our apples-to-apples cooler comparison reveals that despite the great looks, Gigabyte's thermal solution is actually the weakest out of all the cards that we've tested today. It seems that the design isn't optimal, because Gigabyte paired just two heatpipes with a large heatsink. I also noticed that the fins are oriented longitudinal, not transverse, which means fewer fins and less surface area. Idle fan-stop has become a standard capability lately, I'm happy to report that the Gigabyte RTX 3050 Gaming OC turns off its fans completely during idle, desktop work and media playback.

The GeForce RTX 3050 is NVIDIA's newest entry-level to mainstream performance graphics card series in the company's 3000 Series lineup. Disobedient to AMD's dramatic 200 USD Radeon RX 6500 XT with 4GB/64-bit graphics memory, 1024 shader processors tied to x4 PCIe lanes; the GeForce RTX 3050 is 50 bucks more expensive (MSRP) based on 8GB/128-bit and 2560 shader processors utilizing x8 PCIe lanes. basically we're looking at 1650 Series performance, but with added Raytrracing options and DLSS. The math immediately becomes visible, NVIDIA will win significantly today. With that 2560 shading cores and Ampere architecture, this 3050 series is bound to impress in the 1920x1080 and maybe even 2560x1440 (WQHD) domain. If stock becomes available in plentiful volumes though, as pricing will be everything. The GPU is again fabricated on an 8nm node derived from Samsung. This process further develops Samsung's 10nm process; no EUV is applied in production just yet. Notable is that a change is in effect, the memory runs at 14 Gbps and finally, entry-level receives 8GB GDDR6. The Ampere lineup nearly doubles ray-tracing performance with Gen2 ray-tracing cores and 3rd iteration Tensor cores. These cards will all be PCIe 4.0 interface compatible and offer HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4a, but most importantly is that nicer shader processor count (referred to as CUDA cores by NVIDIA). We now meet the NVIDIA GA106 GPU. And despite being a lower segmented card, it still holds a sizable GPU die. In this round, NVIDIA is not seeding Founder edition cards, aka FE GeForce RTX 3050. But of course, they do present the reference specification; a boost clock of 1777 MHz and a base clock of 1552 MHz.