The Zotac GeForce RTX 3050 Twin Edge OC features a boost clock of 1807MHz, 30MHz higher than the reference clock. It only makes a small difference in performance, but the official MSRP of the card is $150 higher. Cards like this will be far more common than Nvidia's hypothetical $249 baseline price, at least until the GPU shortages are over.
Reasons to buy
+
+ Slightly faster than a reference card
+
+ Runs cool and efficiently
+
+ Cards like this might actually be in stock
Reasons to avoid
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60% MSRP increase
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Only a 1.7% factory overclock
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No frills design
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The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 officially went on sale on January 27, 2022. The theoretical starting price is only $249, which of course, feels like a wild fantasy in the wake of continuing shortages and inflated GPU prices. While Nvidia sent us the EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black, a card with reference clocks (now that we've updated the VBIOS), and is supposed to sell for $249, there are plenty of other models that have significantly higher MSRPs. Like the Zotac RTX 3050 Twin Edge OC, which has a suggested price of $399.
What do you get for the extra $150? How about a 1.7% factory overclock. Oh, and it might be slightly more available than the red herring $249 models — after all, why sell cards at Nvidia's MSRP if you can tack "OC" onto the name and give it a much higher price?
We've already covered the RTX 3050 baseline performance in our launch review, so head over there for additional details. For this Zotac review, we're going to focus specifically on how it differs from the reference models.
Spoiler: Anyone with even a tiny amount of hardware knowledge could easily overclock any RTX 3050 GPU to at least the levels we see on the Zotac Twin Edge OC. It's really just the add-in card (AIC) partners ignoring Nvidia's hypothetical MSRP and instead charging whatever price the market will accept. And right now, with cards like the RTX 2060 selling for over $500 on eBay, we're not going to see aggressively priced cards from anyone in more than token quantities.
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GPU Specifications
Graphics Card
Zotac RTX 3050 Twin Edge OC
RTX 3050
RTX 3060
RX 6500 XT
Architecture
GA106
GA106
GA106
Navi 24
Process Technology
Samsung 8N
Samsung 8N
Samsung 8N
TSMC N6
Transistors (Billion)
12
12
12
5.4
Die size (mm^2)
276
276
276
107
SMs / CUs
20
20
28
16
GPU Cores
2560
2560
3584
1024
Tensor Cores
80
80
112
N/A
RT Cores
20
20
28
16
Boost Clock (MHz)
1807
1777
1777
2815
VRAM Speed (Gbps)
14
14
15
18
VRAM (GB)
8
8
12
4
VRAM Bus Width
128
128
192
64
ROPs
48
48
48
32
TMUs
80
80
112
64
TFLOPS FP32 (Boost)
9.3
9.1
12.7
5.8
TFLOPS FP16 (Tensor)
37 (74)
36 (73)
51 (102)
N/A
Bandwidth (GBps)
224
224
360
144
TDP (watts)
130
130
170
107
Launch Date
Jan-22
Jan-22
Feb-21
Jan-22
Suggested Price
$399
$249
$329
$199
Overclocking the Factory Overclock
You can see some of the primary contenders for the RTX 3050 above, along with the mostly meaningless overclock that Zotac provides. We'll go ahead and kick things up a notch with some manual overclocking, though, which should add some spice to the results. How far could we push the RTX 3050? Well, certainly not far enough to catch the RTX 3060, but we did overclock the memory — something very few factory overclocked cards do.
We loaded up MSI Afterburner, maxed out the power limit slider (at 110%), and after some experimentation, ended up with a +200MHz GPU clock and +1000MHz on the GDDR6. That brought the memory speed up to an effective 16Gbps, and GPU clocks tended to land slightly above the 2.1GHz range during gaming. Does that mean any RTX 3050 will overclock this far? We can't make any guarantees, but we weren't pushing particularly hard, and a modest boost to fan speeds seemed to easily keep the temperatures in check.
We limited our overclocked testing to 1080p ultra settings, just to cut down on the amount of time and repetition required. Additional tweaking might improve things another 1% or so, or decrease it if the settings prove to be unstable, but we'll leave that for the more adventurous to try out.
Jarred Walton is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on everything GPU. He has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge '3D decelerators' to today's GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.
The Twin Edge OC model from Zotac on the RTX 3060 had one extra heat pipe than the non-OC model, so the cost increase may be because of hardware changes too. Their 3050 web pages doesn't show any hardware changes though.
