EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black 8GB Review

How Much Does It Cost?

Obviously, with the market the way it is right now, I’m expecting a bit of a double-edged sword with stock and prices. Will there be cards at their MSRP on the market? Yes, I fully expect there will be, but I don’t know how many. Will many retailers push the prices up and will scalping be an issue? Yes, I fully expect that too. So while I can give you the expected MSRPs, I of course, cannot guarantee that.

Out of all the cards I’ve reviewed for today’s launch, the EVGA and Zotac cards are meant to be the base MSRP set by Nvidia of $249. However, for some reason the OC version of the Zotac will be another $150 on top of that… bonkers! I don’t have fixed prices for the Palit or the Inno3D, but they’re not the base models or the top models of their respective range, so they’ll be around $20-50 above the MSRP, so likely around $300 overall. However, the largest of the cards, the Gigabyte Gaming OC will be $379, likely due to the significantly bigger cooler.

• Palit RTX 3050 Dual OC 8GB Review – $249-$300
• Inno3D RTX 3050 Twin X2 OC 8GB Review – $249-300
• Gigabyte RTX 3050 Gaming OC 8GB Review – $379
• Zotac RTX 3050 Twin Edge 8GB Review – $249
• EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black 8GB Review – $249

Overview

It’s easy to be impressed by Nvidia’s new graphics cards, as they’ve all delivered some very impressive performance. Sure, out of the cards tested, they’re all broadly similar, but one thing that does excite me about EVGA’s is that it’s also one of the most affordable, but still, it was every bit as competitive when it comes to performance. Overall though there was never more than a handful of frames difference between any of the cards. If anything though, that makes this MSRP card all the more impressive.

EVGA has given the card a pretty cool design too. Those huge fans look stunning and while it was one of the louder cards tested, it’s still not a noisy card in the grand scheme of things. Plus, at just 62C, it was one of the coolest we’ve tested, so those fans are clearly doing a great job. Perhaps you could even ease the fan curve for less noise if you felt so inclined. Personally, I’m happy with it as it is, as it means the card isn’t going to throttle even after an extended gaming session.

It’s a shame this card doesn’t have a backplate like many of its rivals, but I appreciate the cut-out PCB style they’ve gone with as it provides added cooling performance. Again, given this is a base model, I don’t mind not having the backplate, so long as it keeps the price down.

Nvidia has certainly taken the fight to the next level here. The new RTX 3050 cards are more expensive than the 6500 XT, but they’re also faster and have more VRAM, making them a suitable option for gaming at 1440p. For 1080p gaming, they’re even decent enough for ray tracing, and DLSS technology certainly fills in a lot of gaps too.

What is clear, however, is that the card is effectively a GTX 1660 with some RTX bells and whistles. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you’re already on a GTX 16xx series card, there’s not a whole lot of reasons to upgrade to this new one. Thankfully, if you’re still on a GTX 1050 Ti, older AMD 4xx/5xx style cards, the performance leap is going to be pretty significant.