Introduction
For this article, we are going to put the ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 3050 Twin Edge OC (ZT-A30500H-10M) through our review process. The RTX 3050 Twin Edge OC is one of four video cards in the Zotac RTX 3050 group. This includes three dual fan versions and one single fan card. The RTX 3050 was released in January 2022 and targeted 1080p gaming with an MSRP of $249. The ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 3050 Twin Edge OC is currently available at the Zotac Store and Amazon for $299. Our card has a dual fan direct contact heatpipe cooling system, a full metal backplate, and is factory overclocked to 1807 MHz. We are testing a full retail version of the video card. The card will carry a three-year warranty if registered at purchase.
GeForce RTX 3050 Specifications
Briefly, the GeForce RTX 3050 is based on NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture manufactured on SAMSUNG 8nm FFN. It has 2,560 CUDA Cores, 48 ROPs, 80 Texture Units, 20 2nd Gen RT Cores, and 80 3rd Gen Tensor Cores. The boost clock is set at 1777MHz. It has 8GB of GDDR6 memory at 14GHz on a 128-bit memory bus at 224GB/s of memory bandwidth. The TGP is rated at 130W. This GeForce RTX 3050 features, of course, Ray Tracing, and DLSS support to improve its performance at 1080p. When released there was no “Founders Edition” version of the 3050s.
ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 3050 Twin Edge OC
As stated our card is one of four in ZOTAC’S product offering at RTX 3050. Only the AMP version has a higher Boost Clock. Our video card features dual fan cooling with a three-heat pipe direct contact heatsink. As part of the IceStorm 2.0 cooling, the heatsink has greater coverage and the fans can be independently controlled. You can see that the heatsink extends well beyond the rear of the PCB.
The fans feature 11 blades and with a FREEZE fan stop, will not spin up unless a certain temperature is reached. The ZOTAC GAMING RTX 3050 Twin Edge OC is equipped with a slotted wrap-around full metal backplate, which also extends well beyond the PCB.
This video card is a dual slot design and has 3 Display Port 1.4a and one HDMI 2.1 output. It measures 8 3/4 x 4 x 1 5/8 inches. There are no LEDs or RGBs. Overclocking parameters and fan settings are controlled using ZOTAC FireStorm. Extra power is supplied by one 8-pin PCIe connector. With TDP listed at 130 Watts, ZOTAC recommends a minimum of 450W power supply.
