Card Layout and Photos

If you have seen one of MSI’s Gaming line of cards for any of the AMD 6000 series or Nvidia 3000 series of cards, then the 3050 Gaming X is going to look familiar. This look is also similar to the Nvidia 2000 series of Gaming cards from MSI as well but with a few changes. The 3050 Gaming X has what I like to can an angular design where MSI has given the front fan shroud has almost no rounded shapes in it. The only exception to that is on the right side of the left fan hole and the left side of the right fan hole. Even the rest of the fan holes have a pointed shape. They use this angular design to create extra 3d shapes all across the card to give the shroud more depth. I like the design when they use some of that depth to hide some of the accent lighting like around the fans and in the three stripes at the top and bottom between the fans, but with the 3050 Gaming X it doesn’t have any of that lighting and it does start to look extra busy. MSI does break things up slightly with grey to contrast the rest of the black shroud in a few areas. But overall it is a very aggressive look.

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The 3050 Gaming X isn’t a small card, especially when compared to the EVGA 3050 XC Black that I previously took a look at. This card comes in at 278 mm long, 130 mm tall, and 49 mm thick. Lengthwise it is similar to the high-end cards from a few generations ago and the card height means it does stick up past the top of the PCI bracket by around 25 mm. As for its thickness, it is 9 mm past the standard 2 slot size, so you will need to leave a space between this and any other card. That is nice for airflow either way, but for some SFF cases that extra thickness could make or break things.

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The fan layout for the 3050 Gaming X is a standard dual fan design with axial fans that blow down into the Twin Frozr 8 cooler. When looking at it, the fans look like they would be two different sizes, but they are both the same size. These are their Torx Fan 4.0’s and what MSI has done with this fan design is paired up fan blades and linked them together at the end of the blade with a partial ring design that helps give the blades additional strength and I imagine doing this rather a full ring also still helps keep fan weight down as well. This helps focus the air down and not out as much as they can to keep things blowing down into the heatsink. The fans have a 10 blade design and the blades have a heavy twist to that as well. Then in the center, they have a metal finish sticker with a black MSI gaming dragon printed on it. I like this a lot better than using the full red bad and it helps keep the card neutral so it should match most builds. Looking through the fan we can see that the Twin Frozr 8 design has small waves on the fan side of the heatsink. MSI says that this design helps keep noise down but I would imaging it also helps each part of the heatsink get some airflow as well. The heatsink layout is horizontal which means a shorter distance for the air to flow through the heatsink which normally means better cooler but it also pushes air out the top and bottom which can add extra heat up against your motherboard and sometimes your SSD if it is in that area. 

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When looking around the top, bottom, and end edges of the 3050 Gaming X you can see that MSI has designed the heatsink to fit tightly up against the PCB and around each component on the PCB. This isn’t a generic heatsink design. It also uses heatpipes which are squared off on top of the GPU to pull heat out across the heatsink to spread the heat around. The bottom of the card has a very open design to push that warmed air out. The top edge does have the shroud wrap around a little more with the branding area, but they were careful to keep it open on any other area beyond that. Down at the end, the card has a bit of a beak design where the shroud sticks out well past the heatsink and even past the backplate. This is also past the fan as well so I’m not entirely sure why they would add that much more to the card length just to continue that angular styling.

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The top edge of the 3050 Gaming X has a few things going on. For starters, it has the front fan shroud wrapping around the top in one area so they could fit MSI branding and the GeForce RTX branding. I would love this to have the RTX 3050 branding personally, which would be a little less generic. The MSI logo is backlit with MSIs mystic light addressable RGBs. If you look closely on the right side you can see that the backplate of the card also wraps around as well. Then between those two close to the end of the PCB (but not at the end of the card) is the power connection. The 3050 Gaming X requires an 8-pin PCIe power plug to keep things running. That plug is flipped around with the clip on the PCB side with the PCB notched to fit it so the heatsink can fit close to the plug without having to account for fitting fingers in to unclip it.

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The back of the 3050 Gaming X does have an all-metal backplate. MSI went with a thick gauge as well but what makes this backplate strong is because at the top and bottom and on the end of the card they have the backplate bent around to wrap around to those sides. There isn’t going to be any way for the 3050 Gaming X to flex later in life. The backplate has a textured black finish with the exception of the top right corner. It looks like it might be painted in this photo but it is machined with a brushed finish in that area. There are a few other accents including below that corner which was printed on that give a darker black look. They also have the GeForce RTX branding and the MSI Gaming logo in the center which are both in bright white and upside down so they are better seen when installed in a normal case. The backplate has the serial number sticker on it just under the power connection which should make it easy to see if you need to get to it without removing the card. Then down at the end, we can see the large holes in the backplate which let us see the heatsink where the one fan can blow through in all of that space past the end of the PCB when ends about an inch past the power connection.

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At the end of the card, the PCI bracket for the 3050 Gaming X is filled with small round holes which give a little bit of ventilation but are far from the airflow that brackets with the large holes would have. The bracket itself has the standard plated steel finish with a tiny bit of tint. With the 3050 Gaming X being so black, a blacked-out bracket would have been a good match. For connections, the 3050 Gaming X has the standard three DisplayPort connections with one HDMI. I like that MSI has the HDMI down at the bottom so it is easier to find, most cards have it right in the middle of the other DisplayPorts.

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So the 3050 Gaming X doesn’t have a crazy amount of lighting. In fact, it has less lighting than the RX 6700 Gaming X that I previously took a look at which had accent lights on the fan side as well. For the 3050 Gaming X, the lighting is limited just to the MSI logo up on the top edge. I’ve talked before about how I’m not a big fan of just having backlit branding all over in builds and this does fit that. I like having the RGB lighting but would prefer cool accents that light the card up without making your case look like times square. But it is nice that with the addressable RGB lighting here you can at least match the lighting with the rest of your build.

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