MSI RTX 3050 Gaming X 8G Review

How Much Does It Cost?

The RTX 3050 has an MSRP of $249/£239, but this is a custom card with a custom cooler and a factory overclock from MSI so you can expect to pay much more than that for it, if you even can. As we know the situation with graphics card pricing is so dire, that even finding a card anywhere near MSRP or even the marked-up custom card price is very unlikely.

Overview

The MSI RTX 3050 Gaming X 8G looks and feels great, with middle of the road thermal and gaming performance. Whilst it came out on top of other 3050 cards in most scenarios, it fell behind in more than a few ways. Its performance left something to be desired when you put it up against other cards, like the 3060 that only costs a little more, but sees higher performance in every benchmark we did, but this is no surprise given that it is higher up in the same series of GPUs.

What is more surprising is that the RTX 3060 was trading blows with the RTX 2060 from last generation throughout testing. The power consumption of MSIs card was on the lower end of our testing, which shows that it can allow for the usage of a lower-powered PSU and helps make it fit within the “budget” category.

Thermal performance was somewhere in the middle of everything we had tested, and wasn’t reaching concerning temperatures but also wasn’t staying particularly cool. Acoustically it was one of the louder cards we’ve tested, though admittedly by only around 1dBA. Overall, it performed about as you would expect from an RTX 3050; the cooler was doing its job in keeping the card at reasonable temperatures but wasn’t aiding in boosting any performance.

Should I Buy One?

Assuming that you can get one at the price it’s meant to be, I think it’ll be a better value for money to either spend less on a less “fancy” RTX 3050 or spend a little more for a better performing RTX 3060. The other option is to grab an RTX 2060 if you can get your hands on one for cheap, possibly even second hand if you are comfortable with it. With that being said if you want to play older games and not newer ones with newer features, you could easily see great performance.

This card would also be a very good option if you want to build a budget VR system. So should you buy one? My sensible response to that would be no, not until prices settle down at least, but if you are in need of a card that isn’t top of the line and you have the opportunity to get one at a reasonable price, then it might be worth it to you, especially if you want to take advantage of DLSS, Ray Tracing and NVIDIA Reflex, but unless RGB is really important to you, I would suggest going for a different RTX 3050 that sacrifices a tiny bit of performance for a better price tag, though as with prices and the way they are right now, can you really afford to be picky? Probably not!