Introduction

The Zotac GeForce RTX 3050 Twin Edge OC in today's review is a mid-range graphics card for 1080p Full HD gaming. It is based on the recently announced RTX 3050 "Ampere." This particular card builds on Zotac's philosophy of simple, functional designs and targets those who simply want to plug and play a GeForce RTX 3050 and don't really care about RGB or other frills. The RTX 3050 was announced at the 2022 International CES, as the most affordable (in relative terms) of the current generation of graphics cards from NVIDIA with all the features and technologies NVIDIA brings to the table, including support for ray tracing. It has no real predecessor as NVIDIA was selling the GTX 16-series below the RTX 2060—the closest parallel we could draw to this card is the GTX 1660 Super.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 shares its underlying silicon with the RTX 3060, the 8 nm GA106 graphics processor. While the latter almost maxes it out, the RTX 3050 only enables two-thirds of the SMs (streaming multiprocessors) on the silicon, resulting in 2,560 out of 3,840 CUDA cores. What's more, the RTX 3050 comes with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit wide memory interface, even as the GA106 is capable of 192-bit. The memory chips are slower, too, running at 14 Gbps compared to 15 Gbps for the RTX 3060. Yet another interesting difference between the two cards is the PCI-Express bus width. The RTX 3050 uses the PCI-Express 4.0 x8 host interface, even as the RTX 3060 has the full x16 interface. Gen 4 x8 seems like plenty of bandwidth for a graphics card of this class. Even when it falls back to Gen 3 on older platform is the bus no wider than x8.



Another interesting fact about the RTX 3050 is that its specifications fit within what the smaller GA107 silicon offers (up to 3,072 CUDA cores, 128-bit memory bus), and a few RTX 3050 cards are in fact based on the smaller chip, albeit with slightly lower board power. The Zotac Twin Edge OC card in this review is based on the GA106 (we checked), but it's possible that some cards from Zotac and others could be based on the GA107. We don't expect any performance difference between the two since the SKU-level hardware specifications are the same.

The Zotac RTX 3050 Twin Edge OC features a compact design meant for maximum compatibility in congested cases. It only needs one 8-pin PCIe power connector. The IceStorm 2.0 cooling solution features a dense aluminium fin-stack heatsink ventilated by a pair of 80 mm fans, including the idle fan-stop feature. As a factory-overclocked card, its GPU ticks at a boost frequency of 1807 MHz, compared to 1777 MHz reference. The card is currently listed at $400, making it one of the most affordable RTX 3050 variants.