MSI GTX 1050 Ti 4GB Gaming X Review

1. Introduction to GTX 1050 Ti2. MSI GTX 1050 Ti 4GB Gaming X3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark5. Unigine Heaven6. Steam VR Performance Test7. Ashes of the Singularity8. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided9. Gears of War 410. Grand Theft Auto V11. Metro Last Light Redux12. Rise of the Tomb Raider13. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt14. Total War: Warhammer15. Technical: Power Consumption16. Technical: Temperatures17. Technical: Acoustics18. Overclocking19. Closing Thoughts20. View All Pages

The GTX 1050 Ti represents Nvidia Pascal's foray into the lower-cost end of mainstream territory that is currently being fought competitively by AMD with the company's current-generation RX 460 and RX 470 Polaris GPUs. With a suggested retail price of £139, Nvidia has carved out a price point which sits the GTX 1050 Ti 4GB somewhat unopposed between the RX 460 and RX 470.

Targeting 1080p gamers, how will the GP107-powered GTX 1050 Ti based on Samsung's 14nm manufacturing process perform? In light of no Founder's Edition of reference board, we answer that question using MSI's factory-overclocked GTX 1050 Ti 4GB Gaming X graphics card.

According to the Steam Hardware survey, 1920×1080 is still, by far, the most popular resolution for PC gamers. So it makes perfect sense for GPU vendors to continually push graphics cards with the sole intention of offering competitive 1080p60 gaming performance. And that's exactly where Nvidia's GTX 1050 Ti comes into play.

AMD's mainstream-first launch approach to its current generation of GPUs has given the company a good position in the lower-cost ends of the mainstream market. The Polaris 11, 14nm RX 460 goes up against Nvidia hardware that is two generation older than Team Green's freshest architecture – the Gen 1 Maxwell-touting GTX 750 Ti.

Go a couple of tenners higher to around £140 and you're at a price point where last generation hardware from both teams is still king; GTX 950 for Nvidia and, roughly, R9 380 for AMD, if you can source an offering. Needless to say, this section of the mainstream market is overdue an update to its offerings.

The new GP107 GPU is built using Samsung's 14nm FinFET manufacturing process. This is different to the higher-end Pascal offerings which use the 16nm FinFET process from TSMC. Transistor count sits at 3.3 Billion. A pair of graphics processing clusters combine to give a total of 768 CUDA cores, 48 Texture Units, and 32 ROPs.

In its reference form, GTX 1050 Ti operates at a base clock of 1290MHz, with a boost frequency of 1392MHz. The four Gigabytes of GDDR5 memory are clocked at 1752MHz, or 7Gbps effective, and access a 128-bit bus. No 2GB or 8GB variants exist. And that's a good thing as 2GB would present an imbalance against the underlying GPU horsepower, while 8GB would be a waste. The higher-priced 3GB GTX 1060 is looking a little red-faced, at least when it comes to VRAM capacity.

Rated TDP of the GTX 1050 Ti is 75W, which is a notable 25% increase over the GTX 750 Ti that the GP107-powered card realistically replaces. But it's still lower than AMD's 120W RX 470. And that 75W figure is actually an important point. The 75W board power rating possibility means that GTX 1050 Ti cards can be designed without a power connector. This makes them suitable for upgrading an off-the-shelf PC with a basic power supply (300W recommended by Nvidia) from the likes of Dell or HP.

But 75W puts the GPU right on the limit of what the PCIe motherboard connector is capable of delivering. Put simply, factory-overclocked graphics card may be forced to utilise a 6-pin PCIe power connector. That's a stark contrast to the GTX 750 Ti, which saw even heavily-overclocked cards (such as the EVGA Superclocked variant we use) shipping without the need for a supplementary power connector, thus widening their applicable market.

Focusing on features, the usual set of Pascal offerings are available – Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) technology, enhanced memory compression technology, and Ansel. As is the case with GTX 1060, SLI is not supported for GTX 1050 Ti. Depending on your preference for hardware upgrades, this may be an issue. However, it is likely that this calibre of graphics card will be better served by being replaced with a newer model in a few years, rather than adding a second card for SLI.

GPU	AMD RX 460	AMD RX 470	Nvidia GTX 750 Ti	Nvidia GTX 950	Nvidia GTX 960	Nvidia GTX 970	Nvidia GTX 1050	Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti	Nvidia GTX 1060 3GB
GPU Codename	Baffin	Ellesmere	GM107	GM206	GM206	GM204	GP107	GP107	GP106
Streaming Multiprocessors /Compute Units	14	32	5	6	8	13	5	6	9
GPU Cores	896	2048	640	768	1024	1664	640	768	1152
Base Clock	1090 MHz	926 MHz	1020 MHz	1024 MHz	1126 MHz	1050 MHz	1354 MHz	1290 MHz	1506 MHz
GPU Boost Clock	1200 MHz	1206 MHz	1085 MHz	1188 MHz	1178 MHz	1178 MHz	1455 MHz	1392 MHz	1708 MHz
Total Video Memory	2GB or 4GB	4GB or 8GB	2GB	2GB	2GB or 4GB	4GB	2GB	4GB	3GB
Texture Units	56	128	40	48	64	104	40	48	72
Texture fill rate	67.2 GT/s	154.4 GT/s	40.8 GT/s	49.2 GT/s	72 GT/s	109.2 GT/s	54.2 GT/s	62.0 GT/s	108.4 GT/s
Memory Clock	7000 MHz	6600 MHz	5400 MHz	6612 MHz	7000 MHz	7000 MHz	7008 MHz	7008 MHz	8008 MHz
Memory Bandwidth	112 GB/s	211.2 GB/s	86.4 GB/s	105.8 GB/s	112 GB/s	224 GB/s	112.1 GB/s	112.1 GB/s	192.2 GB/s
Bus Width	128-bit	256-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	256-bit	128-bit	128-bit	192-bit
ROPs	16	32	16	32	32	56	32	32	48
Manufacturing Process	14nm	14nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	14nm	14nm	16nm
TDP	75W	120W	60W	90W	120W	145W	75W	75W	120W
Power Connector(s)	None	1×6-pin	None	1×6-pin	1×6-pin	2×6-pin	None	None	1×6-pin
Current OcUK Starting Price	~£125 (4GB)	~£170 (4GB)	~£120	~£130 Amazon	N/A	N/A	~£115	~£140	~£190

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