Inno3D RTX 3050 Twin X2 OC 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

Nvidia has come out swinging with their latest graphics cards, and they’ve all delivered some very impressive performance figures. Of course, it’s true that all of the RTX 3050 cards I’ve tested this week performed about the same. However, even though there was only a few frames difference in any particular benchmark, to Inno3D RTX 3050 Twin X2 OC was a strong contender. The larger cooler and factory overclock keep it a little higher up the performance charts than its rivals.

The design of the card isn’t quite to my taste, but I can certainly see that it’ll appeal to a lot of gamers. It’s a little too angular and overdesigned for my taste. However, the new heatsink and shroud design is still something I would gladly buy, as it not only delivered impressively low temperatures, but it was also one of the quietest cards tested. Overall, I’ll take this level of performance like that over aesthetics all day long. I have to admit though, they do have a unique looking card, and I’m sure that will prove popular if the price is right. The larger heatsink and dual fan configuration made easy work of the RTX 3050 chipset.

What is impressive is the performance and every game tested was perfectly playable at 1080 and 1440p with decent settings. While the Nvidia cards are more expensive than the AMD RX 6500 XT’s that launched last week, they are clearly more powerful too. AMD went with 4GB VRAM, and that seems to be OK for 1080p gaming on a budget. However, the new entry-level RTX 3050 cards are surprisingly well suited to 1440p gaming too, as well as some playable ray-traced gaming. Clearly, 8GB of VRAM is a big advantage to these cards.

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.