Building a new PC in this day and age can be an incredibly expensive undertaking, especially with the cost of GPUs (opens in new tab). I hoped that with the large GPU shortage we would almost no longer see ridiculous price increases, but I had not counted on new MSRPs are still so unreasonable (opens in new tab). Putting together a high-end machine is still too expensive for many of us, but there’s good news that entry-level cards are seeing some love.
The Nvidia RTX 3050 GPU (opens in new tab) is a pretty solid choice for an entry-level card, especially with this new upgrade. video cardz (opens in new tab) has seen new MSI RTX 3050 GPUs starting at a lower power consumption of 15W, which will be the third variant of the 3050 to be released, and it looks to be the best yet.
The first desktop 3050s ran an older GA106 processor that had 2560 CUDA cores, but didn’t take full advantage of Nvidia’s Ampere processor. The second lot of 3050s had fewer cores but ran a more recent Ampere compatible processor. Now we’re at the third generation, which again has 2560 cores and a new processor, so it should be the best of the lot by far.
Ventus 2X 8G OCV1 from MSI (opens in new tab) is the first model of this style of 3050 to appear online, with that full compliment of 2560 CUDAs and 8 GB of 14 Gbps 128-bit memory. Plus there’s that 15W less power consumption over the previous OV model, so be sure to get the right one. As VideoCardz points out, that drop in power consumption is achieved with this minor change to the GPU, so it looks like a fairly efficient package.
This is great news for anyone planning to build mid-tier lower power, although we’d love to see the price of these cards drop a bit further. As it stands, they remain a bit expensive for what you get, but if you want to run a banging 1080p ray tracing setup, that lower power draw makes these 3050s more tempting than before.
This is certainly in line with the sort of thing we want to see PC gaming hardware in 2023. Out here in the real world, most of us can’t afford the latest hotness when it comes to PC parts and instead look for affordable, economical, and even eco-friendly options. If a lower-powered RTX 3050 starts a trend toward more efficient entry-level GPUs, then 2023 might look brighter than I thought.