Zotac RTX 3050 Twin Edge 8GB Review

How Much Does It Cost?

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.

• Palit RTX 3050 Dual OC 8GB Review – $249-$300
• Inno3D RTX 3050 Twin X2 OC 8GB Review – $249-300
• Gigabyte RTX 3050 Gaming OC 8GB Review – $379
• Zotac RTX 3050 Twin Edge 8GB Review – $249
• EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black 8GB Review – $249

Overview

The latest cards from Nvidia are really hitting the mark today, delivering some surprisingly impressive performance for the new entry-level RTX series of cards. What isn’t surprising, is that pretty much all of the RTX 3050 series cards I’ve tested this week all perform broadly the same, give or take a few FPS here and there.

The Zotac card did great though and given it’s an MSRP card, it was hardly lacking in performance compared to its more expensive counterparts. It’s also a very attractive card, and I think Zotac wins big points for such a slick and modern looking design that’s not overly flashy. Even for an MSRP card, you still get a backplate as well, something the EVGA card was lacking. The oversized fans look awesome and delivered the quietest performance of all the RTX 3050 cards I’ve tested. Even more impressive, it also turned out to be the quietest RTX 3050 I’ve tested, so whatever you’re doing Zotac, keep at it!

There was rarely more than 2-3 frames difference between any of the cards, but it’s clear that Nvidia’s new chipset has got AMD pretty whipped. Admittedly, the AMD cards are good for 1080p gaming, and they’re a fair bit cheaper too so there’s some appeal there. However, for what they cost, the RTX 3050 delivers impressive gaming performance even at 1440p. Plus, you get the added benefit of ray tracing, which worked better than expected. Of course, there’s also DLSS, Reflex, Broadcast and other Nvidia technologies too.

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.