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.

Packaging

The Card

The EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black is instantly recognizable as an EVGA card from the GeForce 30 Series. The primary color is black, with silvery highlights on the front. A backplate is not available.


Dimensions of the card are 20.5 x 11.0 cm, and it weighs 528 g.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include one HDMI 2.1 and three DisplayPort 1.4a ports.


The card has one 8-pin power input. This configuration is rated for up to 225 W of power draw.


The GeForce RTX 3050 does not support SLI.

Teardown

EVGA's thermal solution uses two heatpipes that go along the whole width of the card. The main cooling plate also provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry. The outer cooler shroud, even though made from plastic, has a very nice texture to it that feels like high-quality.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles, videos or forum posts.



High-res versions are also available (front, back).

Circuit Board (PCB) Analysis

The GPU VRM is a four phase-design controlled by an uPI uP9512R controller.


Alpha and Omega AOZ5312UQI DrMOS chips are used for GPU voltage; they are rated for up to 60 A output current.


The memory VRM is single-phase and managed by a uPI uP1666Q controller.


For memory, a OnSemi FDPC5018SG dual-MOSFET is used; it's specified for currents up to 70 A.


The GDDR6 memory chips are made by Micron and carry the model number D9ZPM, which decodes to MT61K512M32KPA-14:C. They are specified to run at 1750 MHz (14 Gbps GDDR6 effective).


NVIDIA's GA106 graphics processor is made using Samsung's 8 nanometer node and has a transistor count of 12 billion with a die size of 276 mm².