The remainder of the card's two-slot width is dedicated to cooling. Connectivity is strong, with two DisplayPort 1.4 ports and two HDMI 2.1 ports, all on a single row. It's a well-built card that I'd expect to retail some margin above the £239 RRP, especially in the current low-supply, high-demand market. Our RTX 3050 graphics card is a Gigabyte Gaming OC model, with 8GB of VRAM, three Windforce fans, a back plate, copper heat pipes, a dense fin stack and RGB lighting - of course, all of these elements contribute to performance. The cuts here all look pretty sensible, except maybe for the memory bandwidth, so it'll be fascinating to see how the RTX 3050 performs. Boost clocks are 1777MHz, the same as the RTX 3060, and the rated TDP is 130W - quite modest, allowing Nvidia to drop their PSU recommendation to just 550W. That's good for 224GB/s of memory bandwidth, less than even the GTX 1660 Ti from last generation. That's still plenty for 1080p or 1440p gaming, although the 128-bit memory bus is on the narrow side. It uses the same GA106 die as the modestly powerful RTX 3060, cut down from 3584 to 2560 CUDA cores and 12GB to 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM. Looking at the specs, the RTX 3050 has potential. That's something we'll have to live with, as we don't have time to re-test every GPU on a PCIe 4.0 system to alleviate an issue that primarily affects only one GPU - but it's also something that you should know about. Note that our GPU testing is performed with a PCIe 3.0 system, which disadvantages the 6500 XT - it comes with only a 4x PCIe link, which is fine for PCIe 4.0 boards but a bit constricting on PCIe 3.0 boards, with a corresponding performance drop-off in some games. That should mean we see significantly better performance than the former and worse than the latter, but it'll be interesting to keep an eye on whether the value proposition is broadly better for any of these three contenders. It's $50 more expensive than the RX 6500 XT released a few days back, and $80 cheaper than the RX 6600 released last year. The RTX 3050 slots between two members of AMD's competing Radeon GPU lineup. If the RTX 3050 can bring those features down to a lower price point without compromising performance, then Nvidia would be on to a winner. So for the RTX 3050, the hope is that we see performance in line with the outgoing RTX 2060, which remains a pretty strong choice for 1080p to 1440p gaming - and has the ability to use DLSS to boost performance significantly, often compensating for the extra strain caused by enabling ray tracing. Normally, we'd expect a next-generation GPU to perform within the same ballpark as the previous-gen part from the same tier. That ought to allow for much better performance on the desktop, but how much can Nvidia wring out of the GA106 die? To find out, we've paired the new GPU with a high-end PC system and tested it in all of our favourite games. The £239/$249 Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is the long-awaited desktop equivalent of the RTX 3050 that debuted in laptops last year, bringing with it a massively expanded power envelope and double the VRAM of the mobile version.
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