Overall and Final Verdict
One thing is for sure, when it comes to cooling and noise performance MSI has been on point with their higher-end card models. In the case of the MSI RTX 3050, Gaming X 8G the cooling performance of their dual-fan Twin Frozr 8 cooler kept the new RTX 3050 which isn’t exactly a hot GPU even on its own stay cool enough to be at the bottom of our charts. It did that while also being a lot quieter than I expected when under load. 100% fan speed noise levels were also good but the 50% results were louder than I expected. MSI combined that with a small overclock that was able to gain a few FPS across the board in our testing when compared to the stock clocked EVGA RTX 3050 that I took a look at for the 3050 launch. The overclock wasn’t the biggest, in fact, I really thought with the much larger cooler the 3050 Gaming X would have a bigger overclock. But I think MSI was aiming to still keep the GPU power limit close to the stock limit. This did seem to affect bender performance when using CUDA which was the one result in which the overclock ended up being slower than the stock clocked card. Overall though, this is a great card for gaming at 1080p and it didn’t have the same limitations that the AMD 6500 XT has with it having 8GB of VRAM and it at least running with 8 PCI 4.0 lanes.
As for the card design itself. The MSI Gaming design has been consistent for a while now. It is a lot more aggressive than some of the card designs with its angular shapes on the fan shroud and mixing in multiple shades of grey along with black for even more depth compared to some simple blacked-out designs. But it isn’t exactly super flashy either, it doesn’t even have a lot of the RGB lighting that higher-end MSI Gaming cards have, the 3050 Gaming X just has the top MSI logo lit up. Compared to the EVGA that I took a look at previously, this is a bigger card. But MSI did also slip in a full metal backplate as well which isn’t something you always find on cards in this performance range.
Talking about pricing these days is a tough one because even when we talk about the prices that cards should be selling for. Due to demand and supply issues unless you catch them at restocks even the suggested prices are lower than the actual pricing. But let's talk about the MSRP of the MSI RTX 3050 Gaming X 8G. The base price for the RTX 3050 was $249 and MSI did have their Aero ITX card at that price point. The 3050 Gaming X however does have its overclock, a much larger cooler, and a backplate. The launch price for this card was $379 and a $130 price increase over the base price is a lot for a card in this range. But as much as it pains me to say, that is still a lower price than what the open market is going to go to for these cards. So in other words, I’m not a big fan of the price. But until things calm down, if you are looking to game at 1080p this would still be a good pickup if you can find it at this price.
Live Pricing: HERE
