Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3050 8GB Review – Imported exotic with a special Turbo button

1 - Introduction, Unboxing, Technical Data, Test System 2 - Gaming Performance 3 - Power Consumption and Standards 4 - Transientens and PSU Recommendation 5 - Temperatures, Fan Curve and Noise 6 - Conclusion and final Words

Graphics cards were in short supply, so of course you look for ways and means to somehow import such a rarity yourself. If you always wanted to be different, because you don’t only want to consume the German market’s standard mush, you’ll also find it in Asia, e.g. with such a Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3050 8GB tested today. Of course, you have to be careful and calculate correctly, because special offers come and go and you also have the dear import VAT on the neck and the shipping to pay. With a bit of luck and coincidence, you can still get a bargain when NVIDIA is doing a promo in Asia, for example. However, outside of such promotions, the purchase is rarely worth it. At least not financially. But no matter. Lucky!

But let’s get to the general things first. The 8 GB of memory are sufficient for this card, and the memory expansion also allows the card to still perform passably in WQHD with a balanced and well-considered mixture of medium settings in picture and DLSS quality. However, this presupposes a certain willingness to compromise visually, so of course you have to be that honest. Once again, there was no Founders Edition, which is why I wrote the launch article with a retail card from Palit. So now we can compare what the Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3050 8GB does better versus a deliberately simple “butter-and-bread” card from Palit. or maybe not.

The trimmed GA106-150 and the unboxing

The chip of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 is also based on the GA106 and has been shortened a bit more. For the GeForce RTX 3050, NVIDIA uses a total of 20 SM (28 for the RTX 3060) of the maximum 30 units of the GA106 (see schematic below), resulting in a total of 2560 (3584 for the RTX 3060) CUDA cores when all units are allowed to work with FP32. In addition to the CUDA cores, NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3060 is also equipped with 20 next-generation RT (ray tracing) cores, 80 Tensor cores, 32 ROPs, and 80 TMUs.

As for memory, the GeForce RTX 3050 still has 8 GB of GDDR6 memory with a speed of 14 Gbps, which has a cumulative bandwidth of 224 Gbps on the 128-bit interface of the 4 memory controllers. The total of 8 lanes on the PCIe 4.0 are more than sufficient for this. Incidentally, even with PCIe 3.0, these are still sufficient to not put the card at a disadvantage. But for the chip yield, this pruning really seems to have brought something.

The gap to the GeForce RTX 3060 is of course predictable and less than 2/3 of the full configuration with 30 SM would probably not make sense in the end. At the end of the day, this allows NVIDIA to increase the yield of the GA106, which is not such a bad decision considering the extremely hungry market. Of course, the missing 10 SM (8 less than the RTX 3060) will be noticed, but you simply clock a bit higher and that’s it.

Resizeable BAR is already implemented on the hardware side, but this implementation currently works rather so-so. So it is really exciting to see what NVIDIA now offers as a new entry-level RTX package, because cards are generally scarce at the moment and the target group of less well-heeled Full HD gamers really exists. It is exactly this suitability that I will examine in more detail today and this test of course still includes the electrical implementation, the PCB, the power consumption and the cooling.

The case of the Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3050 8GB follows the familiar design language with beading and color accents. White as the color of choice (how alternate!) and ABS as the main component – that’s all there is to the radiator cover. Of course, it is not luxurious, but the feel is rather average, and it at least looks good in white builds. Real highlights look different, but we are still in the entry-level segment (even if not in terms of price).

The overall construction with the 4.5 cm installation depth plus the 4 mm for the backplate made of white coated light metal (a bit of luxury is necessary) makes this card a 2.5 slot design with all known advantages and disadvantages. The usual cutout for the air vent does not exist, since the PCB is as long as the cover here. Or so short, depending on how you look at it.

At just under 790 grams, the card is slightly heavier than the tested counterpart from Palit, which is not surprising since the cooler is more bulky. The length of 24 cm is rather average. The installation height of 10.5 cm from the upper edge of the PCIe slot with the card installed to the top of the cover is also still within the usual range, so not too high.

The single 8-pin connector on the top is quite sufficient and it also visually marks the end of the hidden board. There is not much to write about the cooler and fan design, because the design with the vertical fins and the two-part cooler with a thick double heat pipe is not new. The NVLINK port has logically been left out, because SLI is dead anyway and not desired here. RGB is found on the top as backlight for the iGame lettering behind a panel.

The obligatory HDMI 2.1 port should not be missing, and of course the three current DisplayPorts. They still release some waste heat from inside the case, but have nothing to do with direct cooling, since the fins look vertical. However, the Turbo button, which serves as a BIOS switch for the dual BIOS, is striking. Colorful veterans will surely know this button. You get a higher boost clock, the possibility to set the maximum power limit (e.g. with the Afterburner) to 150 watts and the fan stop is omitted. The two 9 cm fans with 13(!) rotor blades then always rotate with 30% PWM.

The opposite end of the card shows us only one more closed event. With that, we are once again completely finished with the externals. The teardown is omitted this time, because the time was a bit shorter and the real special features are missing. So the PCB does not contain any exciters, also good.

The data of the Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3050 8GB is once again shown in the latest GPU-Z screenshot, the rest I already listed above. The 1552 MHz base clock corresponds to NVIDIA’s reference specification and Colorful raises the reference’s 1777 MHz boost clock to 1822 MHz ex-factory. The 1750 MHz memory clock was to be expected and the memory expansion with 8 GB on the 128 bit interface logically as well, when you think of the 4 memory controllers from the schematic shown above.

Again, I have a table for all statisticians among you, before it really gets going from the next page on.

Test system and evaluation software

The benchmark system is new and is no longer in the lab, but in the editorial room again. I now also rely on PCIe 4.0, the matching X570 motherboard in the form of an MSI MEG X570 Godlike, and a select Ryzen 9 5950 X that has been heavily overclocked water-cooled. In addition, there is fast RAM as well as several fast NVMe SSDs. For direct logging during all games and applications, I use NVIDIA’s PCAD, which increases the comfort immensely.

The measurement of power consumption and other things is carried out here in the special laboratory on a redundant test system that is identical down to the last detail, then on two tracks using high-resolution oscillograph technology…

…and the self-created MCU-based measurement setup for motherboards graphics cards (pictures below), where at the end in the air-conditioned room also the thermographic infrared images are created with a high-resolution industrial camera. The audio measurements are done outside in my Chamber.

I have also summarized the individual components of the test system in a table: