EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black Gaming, 8GB GDDR6, HDMI, 3x DP

EVGA as always impresses with a smaller form-factor GPU with the GeForce RTX 3050 XC BLACK graphics card, but it's more the state of the GPU market and NVIDIA and AMD that are making this RTX 3050 + RX 6500 XT launch a mess.

Well as far as the RTX 3050 performance goes, it has its ups and downs. This is a big improvement over the last generation of xx50 cards and overall it trades blows with the GTX 1070 and sometimes the GTX 1080 in our tests which both are older cards but still solid performing cards when it comes to 1080p performance. The RTX 3050 was capable of playable 1440p performance and at 1080p didn’t struggle with anything. It also hit big numbers on older esports titles like CS:GO as well for those looking to take advantage of ultra-high refresh rate monitors without throwing down for high-end GPUs.

All of that said, NVIDIA strikes all of the right chords with the GeForce RTX 3050. The card offers plenty of performance for its target audience, it’s overclockable, it runs cools and quiet, and it doesn’t lack feature support relative to its higher-end counterparts in the RTX 30-series. If you’re in the market for a mainstream GPU and happen to find an RTX 3050 at a reasonable price, we can easily recommend it.

EVGA's GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black is a highly compact version of the RTX 3050 that ticks at baseline specs. Visually, I like what EVGA has done with the card; the different surface textures combine nicely to create a high-quality product. I only wish they had included a backplate, too. While it's very compact, the EVGA cooler works well and reaches good temperatures of only 60°C. Noise levels are a tad bit high with 33 dBA. It would have been easy to tune the fan curve for slightly higher temperatures with much lower noise output. Given the acoustic results of other cards tested today, I'm a bit surprised noise levels are relatively high across the board—the Radeons we tested recently do much better here. Idle fan-stop has become a standard capability lately, I'm happy to report that the EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black turns off its fans completely during idle, desktop work, and media playback.