Obviously, with the market the way it is right now, I’m expecting a bit of a double-edged sword with stock and prices. Will there be cards at their MSRP on the market? Yes, I fully expect there will be, but I don’t know how many. Will many retailers push the prices up and will scalping be an issue? Yes, I fully expect that too. So while I can give you the expected MSRPs, I of course, cannot guarantee that.
Out of all the cards I’ve reviewed for today’s launch, the EVGA and Zotac cards are meant to be the base MSRP set by Nvidia of $249. However, for some reason the OC version of the Zotac will be another $150 on top of that… bonkers! I don’t have fixed prices for the Palit or the Inno3D, but they’re not the base models or the top models of their respective range, so they’ll be around $20-50 above the MSRP, so likely around $300 overall. However, the largest of the cards, the Gigabyte Gaming OC will be $379, likely due to the significantly bigger cooler.
Nvidia may be launching their RTX 3050 series cards a price bracket up from the latest AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT, but it’s clear that they’re a more powerful card overall. For 1080p gaming, the AMD cards are surprisingly competent despite their 4GB VRAM design. However, with a more powerful chipset and 8GB of VRAM, the new Nvidia cards dominated at 1080p, and still kept on giving playable performance figures at 1440p too.
Admittedly, the performance of all these new cards seems to be broadly the same, regardless of how big/small their coolers are or their overclocks. However, being the most expensive one tested today, and having the biggest cooler, there’s a lot more riding on the Gigabyte Gaming OC.
It did perform a little bit better than its rivals, but it’s still a closer race. You’re paying for the larger cooler and the factory overclock. Overall, that means more raw material cost too, so it’s easy to see why it’s more expensive, but it’s really up to you if you feel it’s something you can justify paying for.
What did surprise me, however, is the ray-tracing performance. It’s not as hopeless as I expected, and with DLSS filling in the blanks, this is turning out to be a competent all-rounder for PC gamers on a tighter budget.
What is clear, however, is that the card is effectively a GTX 1660 with some RTX bells and whistles. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you’re already on a GTX 16xx series card, there’s not a whole lot of reasons to upgrade to this new one. Thankfully, if you’re still on a GTX 1050 Ti, older AMD 4xx/5xx style cards, the performance leap is going to be pretty significant.
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