The new GeForce RTX 3050 variant delivers the same performance but with less power

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3050 It’s no one’s idea of ​​a powerhouse, but it’s a decent 1080p GPU and it’s still the cheapest way to buy in Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series ecosystem if you want DLSS 2.0 support or Nvidia’s implementation of ray tracing. MSI has published specifications for A revised version From One of their RTX 3050 GPUs (Via VideoCardz), and advertising the same general features and performance levels but with a 15W lower power consumption rating.

The lower power consumption appears to come from the GPU’s use of a smaller graphics die, called the GA107. Older RTX 3050s use the same GA106 dies as the RTX 3060 series, but with many of the 3840’s CUDA cores turned off. This could allow Nvidia to reuse partially defective GA106 dies, but as chip revenue improves and the number of defective dies decreases, it means either Ship fewer RTX 3050s or put perfectly good chips in cheaper GPUs. The GA107 die includes a maximum of 2560 CUDA cores, and seems to require slightly less power than the GA106 die with the same exact number of cores enabled.

The two MSI cards in question have nearly the same specs, regardless of power consumption: a boost clock of 1807MHz, 14Gbps of memory bandwidth thanks to GDDR6 on a 128-bit memory interface, and 2560 CUDA cores. One other change is that the newer revision has two DisplayPorts and two HDMI ports, instead of three DisplayPorts and one HDMI port, which is a small change likely unrelated to the GPU change. The other thing is that the card now requires a 6-pin power plug, instead of an 8-pin plug.

A little less power use is a good thing, but this new RTX 3050 card still requires up to 115 watts of power, which is well above the 75 watts maximum that any expansion card can deliver through a PCI Express slot without having to. . Additional power connector. GPUs without a power connector are quite rare, but still of interest to people who are upgrading an ultraportable or cheap box from HP or Dell with a lower capacity power supply and no 6- or 8-pin power connector.

These quiet GPU updates usually eventually become the default configurations, and older revisions are phased out over time as supplies dry up – this has happened with the “Light Hash Rate” (LHR) versions of the RTX 3080 and 3070 GPUs, GDDR6 version of the GTX 1650and RTX 2060 With 12 GB of RAM instead of 6 GB, among others. We were expecting this to happen with the RTX 3050, eventually, but for now we expect most cards to continue using the partially crippled GA106 die.