Conclusion

Conclusion

The graphics card arena has been crazy the past six month, the high demand due to mining shifted everything, artificially increasing prices to near insane levels. To a large degree, that is still the same. What you have seen today should cost roughly 149 EURO or USD. You can expect to pay 239 USD/EURO for a card like this at the time of writing, and yeah that's just not good for something entry level at the bottom of the performance stack. We do need to leave that weird pricing dynamic behind us though and look at what the hardware actually offers. So let's do just that.

I'll keep saying this, at 1080P this card still manages to impress.The 1050 Ti cards pump out very decent framerates, and remember, we test at the very best image quality settings, the way it's meant o be played on a PC (no pun intended there). Acoustics and cooling are fine as well, 57 Degrees C under heavy load.  Sure, this is entry level stuff, but they are easy to use cards alright -- just pop them in, install a driver and you're good to go. While I included Quad HD and Ultra HD results in this article, obviously the 1920x1080 resolution is the domain of the focus for products like tested today. The 4 GB of graphics memory does make a lot of sense for this product. Realistically the 1050 Ti 4GB is a bit all over the place in the benchmarks, some games behave extremely well where others just have a hard time. It is a fun card but is outperformed by a product like the RX 470/570. 

Aesthetics

It's small, bright 'n white and serves most purposes and needs just fine. These cards are not designed for a massive PC with side window chassis. But even then, the looks remain trivial at best, totally fine as far as I am concerned. Being an entry-level card, face it, this card does look terrific if you are into that white theme. It comes with a custom design PCB, and is properly cooled with the cooler and even gets some white LED bling, it looks great. 

Cooling & Noise Levels

This card runs at roughly 57 Degrees C, though the compact design does make the card more audible compared to what others offer, it's all fine really. These cards run roughly at 35 dBA, which is silent. I do need to note, they do not spin down with the PC in an idle state, the fans run all the time. There was not any audible coil noise heard. We did hear a tiny bit of fan rattle, but doubt would hear that in a closed chassis.

Power Consumption

GP107-A1 Pascal series GPUs are rated as having a 75 Watt TDP under full stress, our measurements show it to be a pretty much at that level and region. Low wattage cards are hard to measure due to the fact that a PSU gets more inefficient at low power usage. But we tag the 1050 Ti at 77 Watts. Again, we do need to weigh in a little reserve here power supply efficiency wise so it might be a notch lower as well. It remains to be a very low value. 

Gaming Performance

The 1050 Ti with 4 GB of graphics memory can game at 1080P. In DX12 with proper PC gaming quality settings, you will run out of power pretty fast though, even at 1080P. But lower image quality a notch and you should be fine. It is a perfect little card for 1080P and the latest Battlefield 1 for example. Overall, in DX11 games we see decent enough performance. With a 4GB model, you'll have more breathing space and that helps quite a bit. Obviously, not everybody requires or demands 100+ FPS and many people find that 30~40 average FPS is good enough, especially with a GSYNC monitor. 

Tweaking

Overclocking wise things are very simple. This card could run and reach a boost frequency of roughly 2000 MHz, the memory subsystem can do 8.5 Gbps at the very least, which is terrific. Our card had newer Samsung GDDR5 ICs, whereas previous models have been spotted with Micron ICs. After these values, you'll run into restrictions mostly set by Nvidia. Check out the overclock pages for more precise numbers. But the 1050 Ti is memory bandwidth deprived, really likes more bandwidth and as such you'll gain a lot from tweaking just that.
  

Last Words

It's March 2018, back in December 2016 the GTX 1050 Ti series was released. The cards have had a good run, but it is time for something new. Realistically though, at a resolution of 1920x1080, these cards still do make a lot of sense. Yeah, it is a fun 1080P range card that can deal with modern games. For it to become successful however the prices need to come down to normal levels, these cards are supposed to be at that 150 euro marker, currently, this specific card sells passes 200,- bucks. The EXOC in White we cannot complain about as GALAX/KFA2 did a good job with the 1050 Ti. Compared to a 2GB 1050 this GeForce GTX 1050 Ti has a little more power under the hood and the 4GB of graphics memory really helps it out dealing with more crispy textures and your framerates when you'd run out of it. Tweaking wise we'd achieve a stable ~2.0 GHz boost clock frequency. With the graphics memory, you should be reaching 8.5 Gbps (effective data-rate) quite easily. our sample did come with snazzy and highly tweakable Samsung ICs, batches differ and if you end up with Micron ones, the results may vary in that aspect. These cards are fun little products that you easily add-in a simple PC. If you can spot them for the right price, these cards can be little gems for your entry-level gaming purposes.

 - H.

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