Nvidia RTX 3050 Review ft. Gigabyte and Palit

The Gigabyte Eagle ships in a black box, with the familiar robotic eye logo visible on the front. On the back, Gigabyte highlights key features of the card, including the dual-fan cooler and backplate design.

The only included accessory is a small quick start guide.

As for the card itself, it's pretty much identical to the RX 6500 XT Eagle we looked at last week, just a bit bigger. That means we still have a grey plastic shroud, along with two 90mm fans. Gigabyte's ever-present ‘alternate spinning technology’ is also featured, meaning one fan spins clockwise while the other spins anti-clockwise, which Gigabyte claims helps to reduce air turbulence, and thus direct more air down onto the heatsink.

We mentioned the RTX 3050 Eagle is a bit bigger than its 6500 XT counterpart, and that is true as it measures in at 213 x 120x 41mm. The RX 6500 XT's dimensions are 192 x 117 x 38mm. The 3050 isn't large by any stretch of the imagination, it may just be slightly less ITX-friendly.

The GeForce RTX and Gigabyte logos are printed on both the side of the card, and on the backplate. It's only a plastic backplate but it is much better than nothing in my opinion, and we can also see a small cut-out on the right-hand side to allow (some) airflow to pass directly through the heatsink and out of the card.

Power requirements consist of a single 8-pin connector, while we find two DisplayPort 1.4 and two HDMI 2.1 video outputs.

Looking at the Eagle's PCB, we can see it is very compact – the backplate extends a good inch or-so past the board itself. Gigabyte is using what appears to be a 4+2+1 VRM, with four phases feeding the GPU. Four 2GB GDDR6 memory modules from Micron are used, carrying the D9ZPM model code.

As for the heatsink, it is undeniably basic, with a single fin-stack and just one copper heatpipe that makes direct contact with the GPU die. We assess thermal performance later in the review.

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