Arrr! Avast ye, me hearties! Nvidia's RTX 3050, with a measly 6GB, be sighted at a merchant's den. But alas, our fears of a wretched GPU flop be not quelled!
2024-01-31
Arr, me hearties! 'Tis bein' said that Nvidia be settin' sail to introduce a new contender to the frugal GPU seas. But alas, the RTX 3050 6GB be lackin' the necessary oomph to make it a true treasure worth chasin'!
Nvidia’s RTX 3050 6GB, a rumored new spin on the budget graphics card from Team Green, has been spotted listed online. German tech site Computerbase noticed that Austrian retailer E-Tec had an RTX 3050 6GB live on its website, but the product listing has since been taken down. However, the listing wasn’t ditched before all the details of this graphics card were grabbed by VideoCardz, including the all-important specs and price.The MSI Ventus 2X OC (overclocked) version of the RTX 3050 with 6GB of VRAM was shown to run with 2,048 CUDA cores, a major 20% cut compared to the 2,560 cores which the existing (8GB) model sports. The Ventus 2X is also listed with a base clock of 1,552MHz and a boost of 1,807MHz, along with a TDP of 130W. As for the price, that requires a huge amount of seasoning, more so than the specs.
At this point, the rumored specs for the RTX 3050 6GB seem rather all over the place, frankly. We’ve heard it’ll maintain the CUDA core count of the existing RTX 3050, or that it’ll be cut down by around 10%, or that it will suffer a major slash to the tune of 20% as is shown here. Even the rumored TDP widely varies. Whatever the case, we’re inclined to say just forget about the hardware specification, really – and hope that Nvidia isn’t cutting much down aside from the VRAM.
The best thing to focus on with all this is that given the weight of rumors, and more than one online retailer jumping the gun now, the RTX 3050 6GB seems to be incoming - and in theory, it’ll arrive as soon as next month, or likely in Q1. As for the price, the retailer has it pitched too high, so we can safely ignore that asking price. The theory is that this graphics card will be priced at $179 or in that ballpark in the US, considerably less than the MSRP of the current RTX 3050 which was $249 at launch.
The problem is that this doesn’t look competitive against AMD. Team Red has a very competitive offering in the form of the RX 6600, which is undeniably one of the best cheap GPUs you can buy. We’re struggling to see how some incarnations of the purported RTX 3050 6GB are going to compete, frankly, unless Nvidia drops the price below the currently rumored demand on the budget gamer’s wallet.