Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3050 is nobody’s concept of a powerhouse, but it surely’s a good 1080p GPU and it is nonetheless the most cost effective manner to purchase into Nvidia’s RTX 3000-series ecosystem in order for you DLSS 2.0 help or Nvidia’s ray-tracing implementation. MSI has revealed specs for a revised model of one among its RTX 3050 GPUs (through VideoCardz), promoting the identical common options and efficiency ranges however reducing the facility consumption estimate by 15 W.

The decrease energy consumption seems to come back from the GPU’s use of a smaller graphics die, referred to as GA107. Older RTX 3050s use the identical GA106 die because the RTX 3060 sequence, however with a lot of that die’s 3,840 CUDA cores switched off. This will permit Nvidia to reuse partially faulty GA106 dies, however as chip yields enhance and the variety of faulty dies decreases, it both means delivery fewer RTX 3050s or placing completely good chips in cheaper GPUs. The GA107 die features a most of two,560 CUDA cores, and it apparently wants a bit much less energy than a GA106 die with the very same variety of cores enabled.

The 2 MSI playing cards in query in any other case have virtually precisely the identical specs, energy consumption apart: an 1807 MHz increase clock, 14 Gbps of reminiscence bandwidth due to GDDR6 on a 128-bit reminiscence interface, and a couple of,560 CUDA cores. One different change is that the newer revision has two DisplayPorts and two HDMI ports, moderately than three DisplayPorts and one HDMI port, a small change that more than likely has nothing to do with the GPU change. One other is that the cardboard now requires a 6-pin energy plug, moderately than an 8-pin plug.

Barely decrease energy use is an effective factor, however this new RTX 3050 card nonetheless requires as much as 115 W of energy, which is effectively above the 75 W max quantity of energy that may be offered to any growth card by a PCI Specific slot with out requiring an additional energy connector. GPUs with out a energy connector are vanishingly uncommon, however they’re nonetheless of curiosity for folks upgrading a super-small PC or an affordable field from HP or Dell with a low-capacity energy provide and no 6- or 8-pin energy connector.

Often, these quiet GPU refreshes ultimately turn into the default configurations, and older revisions are phased out over time as provides dry up—this has occurred with the “lite hash charge” (LHR) variations of RTX 3080 and 3070 GPUs, the GDDR6 model of the GTX 1650, and the RTX 2060 with 12GB of RAM as an alternative of 6GB, amongst others. We would count on this to occur with the RTX 3050, ultimately, however for now count on most playing cards to proceed utilizing the partially-disabled GA106 die.