The GeForce RTX 3050 A recently popped up in Nvidia’s GeForce drivers. We could only guess at the specs initially, but now Nvidia has confirmed the GeForce RTX 3050 A’s existence as well as some key specs. We reached out to Nvidia and were informed that the graphics card leverages a down-binned AD106 (Ada Lovelace) silicon and represents the third iteration of the RTX 3050 Laptop GPU, already a questionable choice for mobile use considering the lack of VRAM.
The new RTX 3050 A, where the “A” probably denotes Ada, only uses a fraction of the potential offered by the AD106 die. According to Nvidia, the GPU will feature just 4GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 64-bit bus along with 1,792 CUDA cores. Power consumption is described as 35-50 watts TGP, which is lower than its 3050 mobile siblings on the top of that range. Many of the available specs for the RTX 3050 A also appear to be lower than the original variant, though there's a catch: We don't have clock speeds for the new part, and Ada tends to clock significantly higher than Ampere.
It’s interesting to see Nvidia switch from the Ampere to the Ada Lovelace for the new RTX 3050 A variant, but it’s a move we’ve seen in the past. For example, a recent RTX 4070 desktop graphics card variant saw Nvidia using down-binned AD103 chips instead of the smaller AD104 GPU. There's also an RTX 2050 laptop chip that uses an Ampere GA107 rather than the expected Turing GPU.
