Introduction

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 a desired GPU model just to plug and play, without frills or a factory overclock. The GeForce RTX 3050 is the most affordable desktop graphics card based on the Ampere architecture and meant for 1080p gaming with fairly high details—ray tracing is very much possible, but you'll 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 1080p gaming, particularly e-sports.

The RTX 3050 is based on the same 8 nm GA106 silicon as the RTX 3060, but with huge differences in specifications. While the latter nearly maxes out the GA106, featuring 3,584 out of 3,840 CUDA cores present on the chip, the RTX 3050 is carved out by disabling a third of the streaming multiprocessors (SM), resulting in 2,560 CUDA 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 12 GB on the RTX 3060. The memory bus width is proportionately narrowed to 128-bit and uses slower 14 Gbps memory chips (compared to 15 Gbps 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 GA106 very much does support 16 lanes, and every custom-design board, including this one, has rudimentary PCB traces for all 16 lanes, but only 8 lanes are enabled. NVIDIA explains this by stating that "dropping to 8 PCIe lanes improves supply. It allows us to source a wider variety of chips for the life of the product." In other words, the company is currently consuming all the GA106 inventory that didn't make the cut for the RTX 3060, and in the future, could carve RTX 3050 cards out of the smaller GA107 silicon, which physically has 3,072 CUDA cores, a 128-bit GDDR6 memory bus, and, more importantly, an 8-lane PCIe Gen 4 bus. Such a switch should result in no change to performance.

The EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black sticks to the essentials with a simple aluminium fin-stack cooling solution and twin-fan setup, no backplate, and no RGB illumination. The card draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. Display outputs include three DisplayPort 1.4a and an HDMI 2.1. It also sticks to NVIDIA-reference clock speeds of 1777 MHz boost and 14 Gbps memory. Logically, EVGA XC Black cards have sold at prices closest to NVIDIA MSRPs. The RTX 3050 XC Black goes for $249, which is in line with the baseline price—it is the only card we're reviewing today that sells at this price. Of course, in the real world, $249 seems like a fantasy.