MSI
Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3050 is nobody’s idea of a powerhouse, but it’s a decent 1080p GPU and it’s still the cheapest way to buy into Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series ecosystem if you want DLSS 2.0 support or Nvidia’s ray-tracing implementation want. MSI has published specs for a revised version of one of its RTX 3050 GPUs (via VideoCardz), which advertises the same general features and performance levels, but cuts estimated power consumption by 15W.
The lower power consumption appears to come from the GPU’s use of a smaller graphics chip called the GA107. Older RTX 3050s use the same GA106 chip as the RTX 3060 series, but with many of that chip’s 3,840 CUDA cores disabled. This allows Nvidia to reuse partially defective GA106 chips, but as chip yields improve and the number of defective chips decreases, it means either shipping fewer RTX 3050s or putting perfectly good chips in cheaper GPUs. The GA107 chip contains up to 2,560 CUDA cores and apparently requires slightly less power than a GA106 chip with the exact same number of enabled cores.
The two MSI cards in question have almost exactly the same specs other than power consumption: an 1807 MHz boost clock, 14 Gbps memory bandwidth thanks to GDDR6 on a 128-bit memory interface, and 2,560 CUDA cores. Another change is that the newer version has two DisplayPorts and two HDMI ports, instead of three DisplayPorts and one HDMI port, a minor change that most likely has nothing to do with the GPU change. Another is that the card now requires a 6-pin plug instead of an 8-pin plug.
Slightly lower power consumption is a good thing, but this new RTX 3050 card still requires up to 115W of power, which is well above the 75W maximum that can be delivered to any expansion card through a PCI Express slot without an additional power connection. GPUs without a power connector are rare, but they’re still of interest to people upgrading a super-small PC or low-cost case from HP or Dell with a low-capacity power supply and no 6- or 8-pin power connector.
Usually these silent GPU refreshes eventually become the default configurations and older revisions are phased out over time as supplies run out. among others the GTX 1650 and the RTX 2060 with 12GB RAM instead of 6GB. We expect this to eventually happen with the RTX 3050, but for now, we expect most cards to continue using the partially disabled GA106 chip.
