With the massive stock shortages that are still currently going on it is really hard to upgrade one’s PC, however, if you are in the market for a 1080p GPU then you should have a look at ASUS’s ROG STRIX 3050 OC edition GPU. This little card is not just fairly cheap, but can run almost anything that you can digitally through it!
The ROG STRIX RTX3050 OC Edition is also a looker, featuring a nice splash of RGB on the shroud (that can be controlled by ASUS Armory software, with the rest of your compatible RGB devices) and it even has an RGB ROG logo on the back plate! It also has a nice brushed aluminum look that really gives it that R30000 look but at a way cheaper price.
The STRIX RTX3050 also is a thicker card, using almost 3 slots (it is actually 2.7 slots) and this is to help cool the GPU down. What also pushes up the thickness of the card to that 2.7 slots is the 3 fans that ASUS has included with this STRIX model(it won’t be a STRIX if it didn’t have 3 fans). I must say that I was expecting the unit to be load underload dude to the 3 fans but I was really surprised by how quiet my test unit was when I was playing Warhammer 3(and even in Forza). When the unit is not churning out graphic goodness it was as quiet as a church mouse. You can as always(thanks again for being a ROG STRIX card) use the Q/P switch on the card for switching between Performance mode and Quiet mode, less change of bricking your card that way in any case.
We talked about how quiet the card is and how much real estate it takes up on your PC (lots of slots but only 30cm long), and how about game performance (the real reason you want to upgrade your GPU). Well, first I ran some synthetic benchmarks in the form of 3DMARK. All the tests were done on a Z690 board with an Intel i7 12700KF processor and 32GB of DDR4 ram. First up was 3DMARK Time SPY, here I got a Graphics score of 6437, which is not that bad at all! Next up was 3DMARK Port Royal (so we can test RTX on the card) and here we got an also good Graphics score of 3696. The final synth tests were Fire Strike, Fire Strike Extreme and Fire Strike Ultra where we got a Graphics score of 15910 in Fires Strike, 7511 in Fire Strike Extreme and finally Fire Strike Ultra with a Graphics score of 3511. Now, this is really not that shabby and was even better than a 1660Ti that I tested a while back.
I moved then on over to real games (well as real as can be). I fired up my PC games pass and downloaded Forza Horizon 5 and Warhammer 3 (the Warhammer 3 was a mistake first due to storage problems). In Forza, I got perfect frame rates with a minimum of 100fps on 1080p and even when I switched out to 1440p it went down to 80-90fps. This was also with most of the settings set to as High as I could put them. I then moved over to Strange Brigade to test the Vulcan and DirectX settings out and even there the minimum FPS was about 90. When I finally got Warhammer 3 to work (make sure you install it on your main drive……it’s picky that way) I got great gameplay out of it as well, with it sometimes dipping to 60fps on 1440p mode (not too big a deal for me). My favourite game still to test RTX on a card is Remedy’s Control and I can say without a doubt you won’t be complaining about performance on the STRIX RTX3050 as I could play the game at 1440p with almost no tearing or massive frame drops.
Overall I was really happy with the ASUS STRIX RTX3050 OC Edition GPU. The card is priced at the moment at a fair price (coming in at about R9k or a bit less which was close to what I paid for my GTX970 back in the day). It looks great, has just the right amount of RGB on the card and that brushed aluminum look I just really love! The ROG STRIX RTX3050 is made for 1080p, however, I didn’t struggle with it at all when I was using it with my native 1440p screen. It has 2 HDMI2.1 ports and 3 Display port 1.4a connectors so you would be covered for almost any monitor you can throw at it. I would say this is the best Budget GPU that you can buy at the moment that is also future proof and you can play almost all the current games at max settings. I would recommend this to any gamer that is looking to upgrade their 900, 1000 series NVIDIA cards and not spend crazy money for a 3060/70 card.
