@jmcphee I am sorry that we didn’t research the RTX 3050 card more thoroughly and discover that, while certainly slower than the 060 series cards, it needs about half the power, at least with the Asus card you purchased, and runs without the need for the additional GPU power connector.
While I feel that you would need extreme patience every time you exported an image and every time you tried to use the Loupe, with only a CPU, that is always the individuals choice.
My tests with the 1050Ti (4GB), and 1050(2GB) cards produced figures that I published here
Thank you for publishing the outcome of your purchases, while I feel that the RTX3050 was a good investment, the power supply was perhaps a step too far and it simply shouldn’t have been necessary to upgrade at all.
This was published in late October 2023 and I found it by asking the question “RTX 3050 does it need a GPU power connector” prompted by your post
Regards
Bryan