Here we are with our first graphics card review of 2022 and to be honest it is really hard to get excited about graphics cards these days. Mainly because of scalpers and the insanely high prices even retail cards are going for. It seems we are on the low-end of the release schedule with both AMD and NVIDIA announcing cards aimed at 1080p and eSports gaming earlier this month at CES. For AMD it was the Radeon RX 6500 XT and for NVIDIA it is the GeForce RTX 3050. This time around NVIDIA is not separating their lower-end cards from their higher-end cards in terms of feature-set. If you remember last generation the RTX cards went down to the RTX 2060 and then we had the GTX 16 series which lacked the RT and Tensor cores. The RTX 3050 will get the full feature-set with both RT and Tensor cores so you will be able to take advantage of real-time ray tracing, DLSS, and much more. Based on the GA106-150 GPU the RTX 3050 will feature 2560 CUDA cores, 80 3rd generation Tensor cores, 20 2nd generation RT cores, and 8GB of GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit memory bus. Today we are checking out MSI’s GeForce RTX 3050 Gaming X 8G which has of course the signature Gaming X look with MSI’s Torx fans, but also a nice GPU Boost speed up to 1845 MHz, which is a slight bump of the reference GPU Boost of 1777 MHz. Is the RTX 3050 worth upgrading to and is MSI’s Gaming X version the one to get? Read on as we find out!
Special thanks to MSI for providing us with the GeForce RTX 3050 Gaming X 8G Graphics Card to review.
Specifications
Packaging
The RTX 3050 Gaming X 8G comes in MSI’s typical graphics card retail box which has a picture of the card on the front and lets us know that it features NVIDIA Ampere architecture, Ray Tracing, and DLSS.
Flipping over to the back there is another picture of the card and some of the main features of the card are detailed.
Getting everything out of the box we have the graphics card itself, a users guide, quick install guide, information on the MSI reward program and a MSI product guide.
