NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050
Ampere entry with full Tensor + RT cores at the $200 tier. 8 GB VRAM is the practical floor for serious 7B work. Bandwidth (224 GB/s) is the bottleneck — ~40-55 tok/s on 7B Q4. Often shipped in pre-built office PCs; the 'I have it because it came with the system' audience.
Extrapolated from 224 GB/s bandwidth — 26.9 tok/s estimated. No measured benchmarks yet.
Plain-English: Edge-of-fit for 7B; expect compromises.
Verdicts extrapolated from catalog VRAM + bandwidth + ecosystem flags. Hover any chip for the rationale. Want measured numbers? Submit your own run with runlocalai-bench --submit.
This card is for the operator who already has it in a pre-built or budget build and wants to run small local models without spending more. It handles 7B Q4 models at ~40-55 tok/s, usable for chat and light code generation. 8 GB VRAM is the floor for 7B; 13B models only fit at Q3 or lower, with degraded quality. The 224 GB/s bandwidth limits throughput—don't expect fast responses on larger models. Pass if you're buying new for local AI; a used RTX 3060 12GB or RX 6700 XT offers more VRAM and bandwidth for similar money. At $200 used, it's acceptable only if it's already in the rig.
›Why this rating
The RTX 3050 is severely bandwidth-limited and VRAM-constrained, making it a poor choice for serious local AI work. It barely handles 7B models and fails on 13B+ unless heavily quantized. The rating reflects its viability only as a free or incidental card.
Overview
Ampere entry with full Tensor + RT cores at the $200 tier. 8 GB VRAM is the practical floor for serious 7B work. Bandwidth (224 GB/s) is the bottleneck — ~40-55 tok/s on 7B Q4. Often shipped in pre-built office PCs; the 'I have it because it came with the system' audience.
Search-fallback links. Editorial hasn't yet curated retailer URLs for this card. Approx. $200.
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Specs
| VRAM | 8 GB |
| Power draw | 130 W |
| Released | 2022 |
| MSRP | $249 |
| Backends | CUDA Vulkan |
Models that fit
Open-weight models small enough to run on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 with usable context.
Frequently asked
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Does NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 support CUDA?
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Where next?
Reviewed by RunLocalAI Editorial. See our editorial policy for how we research and verify hardware specifications.