Palit Nvidia RTX 3050 KalmX debuts with fanless design

After getting leaked last month, the Palit RTX 3050 KalmX has finally made its official debut. It's the first GPU of its kind, bringing fanless and 0 dB design for silent PC builds. Also, it's the first passively cooled graphics card Palit launched in nearly five years. The last one was the GTX 1650 KalmX, which debuted in 2019.

Compared to its predecessor, the newer RTX 3050 KalmX sports a relatively large fanless heatsink. However, it still retains the dual-slot design as the predecessor. A single-slot design would've made it perfect for some small-sized silent computer builds. But that could've possibly reduced the cooling capacity of the heat sink.

Talking of which, Palit says that the passive cooler is capable of dissipating 70 watts of power. Also, as the leak from last month hinted, this fanless Nvidia RTX 3050 GPU has 6 GB of RAM. So, this is not the standard version of the card that Palit has slapped a fanless cooler on.

Instead, it's the new SKU for RTX 3050, which has 60W less TDP and 2 GB less VRAM. In addition, this GPU with passive cooling has a narrower bus, at 96-bit instead of the 128-bit bus found in the standard version. The new graphics card also has lower CUDA cores, at 2304 instead of 2560 CUDA cores.

All this means that the new Palit RTX 3050 KalmX won't perform similarly to a regular RTX 3050 8 GB GPU (PNY Vetro Dual Fan variant curr. $220 on Amazon). But on the bright side, the fanless card doesn't have any power connectors and requires only a 300W PSU to run. Other highlights of the card include HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4, and DVI ports. You can learn more from the complete spec sheet attached below. As for the price, there's no word on it yet, but it should be under $200.