EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black Review 2022 – The EVGA GeForce RTX-3050 XC Black graphics card is the company’s baseline custom design take on the GeForce RTX-3050 NVIDIA is releasing to market today.
The XC Black SKU from EVGA’s stable has been typically targeted at those who want a graphics card based on the desired GPU model just to plug and play, without frill’s or a factory overclock. The GeForce RTX-3050 is the most affordable desktop graphics card based on the Ampere-architecture and meant for 1080-p gaming with fairly high details.
Ray tracing is very much possible, but you will need to tone down the details or make good use of the DLSS-feature. A section of the market will see this more as an affordable Ampere meant for 1080-p gaming, particularly esports.
The RTX-3050 is based on the same 8nm GA106 silicon as the RTX-3060, but with huge differences in specifications. While the latter nearly maxes out the GA-106, featuring 3,584 out of 3,840CUDA cores present on the chip, the RTX-3050 is carved out by disabling a third of the streaming multiprocessors (SM), resulting in 2,560CUDA cores, 20 RT-cores, and 80 Tensor cores.
Keeping with the theme of “two-thirds,” the RTX-3050 only gets 8 GB of memory compared to 12GB on the RTX-3060. The memory bus width is proportionately narrowed to 128bit and uses slower 14Gbps memory chips (compared into 15Gbps on the RTX-3060).
The most remarkable difference in specifications between the RTX-3050 and RTX-3060 has to be the PCI-Express bus width, which has been halved to PCI-Express-4.0 x8. The GA-106 very much does support 16lanes, and every custom-design board, including this one, has rudimentary PCB traces for all 16lanes, but only 8lanes are enabled.
NVIDIA explains this by stating that “dropping to 8PCIe lanes improves supply. It allows us to source a wider variety of chips for the life of the products.”
In other words the company is currently consuming all the GA-106 inventory that did not make the cut for the RTX-3060, and in the future, could carve RTX-3050 cards out of the smaller GA-107 silicon, which physically has 3,072CUDA cores, a 128bit GDDR6 memory bus, and, more importantly, an 8lane PCIe Gen-4 bus.
The EVGA GeForce RTX-3050 XC Black sticks to the essentials with a simple alumunium fin-stack cooling solution and twin-fan setup, no backplate, and no RGB-illumination. The card draws power from a single 8pin PCIe power-connector.
Display outputs include three DisplayPort 1.4a and an HDMI-2.1. It also sticks to NVIDIA reference clock speeds of 1778 MHz boost and 14Gbps memory. Logically, EVGA XC Black cards have sold at prices closest to NVIDIA MSRPs. The RTX 3050XC Black goes for $250, which is in line with the baseline price and it is the only card we are reviewing today that sells at this price. Of course, in the real world, $250 seems like a fantasy.
Hopefully this article EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black Review 2022 can be benefit and useful.