Lenovo just revealed the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti and RTX 3050

By Jacob Roach April 20, 2021

Although Nvidia hasn’t formally unveiled the RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti, it’s inevitable that the two budget GPUs will show up in laptops eventually. Lenovo jumped the gun a bit, however, revealing the 3050 and 3050 Ti as options in its upcoming Legion 5 Pro laptop. Along with confirming the cards exist, Lenovo also posted the clock speed, memory capacity, and power of the two mobile graphics cards.

Videocardz grabbed a screenshot of the specs page before Lenovo updated the listing (the section now reads “up to Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070” instead). The listing shows the RTX 3050 Ti with 4GB of GDDR6 memory, a listed boost clock of 1,485MHz, and a maximum power draw of 95 watts. The RTX 3050 is identical, though oddly comes with a higher listed and achieved boost clock speed.

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This isn’t the first time the laptop RTX 3050 has shown up. Asus referenced the card last month for its TUF Dash F15 laptop, but removed any mention shortly after the news broke. The two leaks show that the 3050 range isn’t a matter of if, but when. And with leaks from two of the leading gaming laptop makers, the cards are likely coming soon.

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The mobile cards are based on Nvidia’s GA107 GPU with 4GB of VRAM on a 128-bit bus. The cards have far fewer CUDA cores compared to the pricier Ampere GPUs — 2,560 for the 3050 Ti and 2,048 for the 3050, according to reports. That puts both cards firmly in the budget tier of laptop GPUs. We expect they’ll become a staple in gaming machines under $1,000, offering decent performance at Full HD with Medium settings.

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The latest Legion 5 Pro features an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H eight-core processor, up to 32GB of RAM, and up to a 2TB M.2 SSD. The upcoming laptop also took some notes from the Dell XPS 13 with its 16:10 display, which features an expanded 1440p resolution, 165Hz refresh rate, 500-nit peak brightness, HDR, and Nvidia G-Sync. Lenovo is already selling the laptop in some regions, but there isn’t a launch date for the U.S. yet.

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Lead Reporter, PC Hardware

Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…

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