Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unbox today we're checking out the geforce gtx 1050 the new 3 gigabyte version and boy is this one bit of a strange animal recently we checked out another strange graphics card though that one was much more of a disaster than this one is and that was the ddr4 version of the GT 1030 a horribly misleading product that really shouldn't exist at least not as a GT 1030 and that one will hopefully go down as the worst graphics card released in history and so hopefully because well I hope we don't get another graphics card as terrible as the ddr4 GT 1030 but anyway let's move on to this guy so hopefully the three gigabyte version of the GTX 1050 isn't going to be nearly as bad in fact it may not be bad at all there's a good chance it won't be looking at the specs but even so it's definitely not a gtx 1050 so been unnecessary and well a bit misleading there from Nvidia prior to May of 2016 there was only one version of the GTX 1050 codenamed GP 107 300 and it came with a 2 gigabyte memory buffer not three however in may and video quietly updated their geforce gtx 1050 page on their website to include a three gigabyte model that looked to slot in between the existing 2 gigabyte 1050 and 4 gigabyte 1050 Ti though it is a little bit more complicated than that the three gigabyte 1050 isn't merely a 1050 with an extra gigabyte of VRAM instead of features 768 cuda cores on a smaller 96 bit wide memory bus and this is due to a change in the backend configuration okay so those 768 cuda cores it's a gtx 10:50 TI with 1 gigabyte less vrm well actually no it's not that either in this table you can see that while it has the same crew decor count as the 1050 TI it has 25% less ROPS and that means it has 25% less than the original 1050 as well although you do get the same 7 gigabits per second gddr5 memory the memory bus has now reduced to 96 bit wide and that's due to the reduction in ROPS which sees one of the four memory controllers disabled the result is just 84 gigabytes per second and memory bandwidth down from the 112 gigabytes per second of the two gigabyte 1050 and four gigabyte 1050 Ti additionally this also means that the l2 cache capacity has been reduced down from one megabyte to 768 kilobytes Nvidia is clocking the cores higher to compensate here but we expect that in some cases this won't help overcome the 25% reduction and memory bandwidth ROPS and cache so why is invidious selling a three gigabyte version of a gtx 1050 that likely won't perform like a 1050 with an extra gigabyte of erm given the specifications we expect that for the most part it will sit between the two gigabyte 1050 and 1050 Ti but there is no doubt going to be a few instances where I'll actually be slower than even the 2 gigabyte 1050 the most likely reason being they had a stockpile of defective GP 107 dies that had a faulty memory controller for example some videos just salvaging those parts by creating the 3 gigabyte 1050 it's a bit odd to see this so late in the product cycle but that's not really the issue here once again the issue is we're seeing multiple different GPU configurations under the one name it's my opinion that at the very least this thing should have been called the gtx 1050 se or ali or pretty much anything other than the 1053 gigabyte regardless of the performance this is still very misleading to the consumer and it's really not unlike the 3 gigabyte and 60 about gtx 1060 situation and really i'm expecting to find a similar result speaking of which on hand for testing you haven't noticed i do have the EVGA geforce gtx 1050 SC gaming that comes with a small 5% factory overclock and right now is selling for $140 us which is basically what you can expect to pay for a gtx 1050 2 gigabyte model that makes it about I think it's about $30 u.s. cheaper than the cheapest gtx 1050 is at the moment so for testing we have 23 games in total all of which have been tested at IUP using various quality settings however I will only be discussed the results for eight of the games and then I'll be jumping into our usual performance breakdown the rest of the graphs will be available for free on our patreon page and the link will be in the video description then finally as usual our Corsair GPU test rebuilt inside the crystal series 570 X has been used and inside we have a core i7 8700 K clocked at 5 gigahertz with 32 gigabytes of ddr4 3,200 memory I realize this hardware configuration is overkill for these entry-level GPUs the idea here though is to remove any potential system bottlenecks that may mask GPU performance plus it also allows me to use these results and compare them to higher end cards that have been tested using the same quality settings ok so I think that's about everything let's get to the good stuff starting with the battlefield 1 results we see the 3 gigabyte 1050 is 9 percent faster than the 2 gigabyte version but 16% slower than the 1050 Ti so that's actually a really great result for the 3 gigabyte version as it is indeed faster than the original 1050 in this title that said it is still quite a bit slower than the 1050 Ti due to the downgrades I spoke of earlier despite the positive performance just seen when testing was a wreck fest we find I can put the different picture here the 3 gigabyte 1050 was actually slower than the original 1050 13 percent slower in fact and that meant it was 21% slower than the 1050 Ti so that is a troubling result there in rec fest but let's move on and see what we find in Tom Clancy's rainbow 6 siege here we see the 3 gigabyte 1050 is 22% faster than the original true gigabyte model and just 11 percent slower than 1050 T I so like battlefield 1 this is a very good result for the 3 gigabyte model moving on we have far cry 5 and we're certainly starting to see some mixed results here this time the three gigabyte 1050 was a few frames sold in the 2 gigabyte model making it 5 percent slower this also meant it was 15% slower than the 1050 to I then we have some testing with fortnight and this shows similar performance between the two gigabyte and three gigabyte 1050 models making the both only slightly slower than the 1050 Ti we also see comparable performance when testing with Total War saga thrones at Britannia here the 3 gigabyte model was 3 percent faster than the to gigabyte version interestingly when playing with ARMA 3 we see an 11% reduction in performance for the 3 gigabyte 1050 when compared to the 2 gigabyte version and the result for the 1% lower also dropped below 60 FPS so this is another poor result for the 3 gigabyte model finally we're going to look at the Warhammer vermintide 2 results and here we see a tie between the 2 and 3 gigabyte versions of the 1050 and this made them both 13% slower than the 10 52 I wrapping things up when it comes to power consumption the three gigabyte 1050 was comparable to the original 1050 only pushing total system consumption about 5% higher ok so from that small 8 game sample we saw some pretty mixed results it has to be said I do have 23 games though so let's look at all 23 and see how their results varied across all those games so here are the results for all 23 games and you've no doubt been drawn to the Wolfenstein result which saw the three-year back model delivering 65% more performance this is definitely an outlier result and it's due to the 2 gigabyte vm buffer of the original 1050 are just being overwhelmed by the maximum in-game quality settings however because the 3 gigabyte model did average over 50 fps and produced a 1% low result of 48 fps I didn't feel the need to reduce the quality settings just to accommodate the 2 gigabyte version still this is a very rare case you're not gonna see too many games producing these kinds of margins at 1080p so let's just remove that result and take a look at this again ok so this looks a bit more normal and now Rainbow six siege is our outlier but this outlier is that nearly as Extreme as the one seen previously overall the three gigabyte model was 4% faster on average but it was still slower in 5 of the games tested 4 of which it was slower by a 5 percent or greater margin we also saw a tie in three titles and then the three gigabyte gtx 1050 was faster by a 5 percent or greater margin intent of the 23 games test of it so certainly not a bad result the 3 gigabyte version of the gtx 1050 is a bit of an odd product for a number of reasons Nvidia say that it is around 10% faster than the 2 gigabyte and we found on average it was 4% faster but there are certainly instances where you could say it's up to 10% faster but I wouldn't say gamers should expect to see 10% performance uplift either way though for the most part it was faster than the 2 gigabyte GTX 1015 as far as I can tell our pricing is pretty much the same at least it is for the EVGA version that we tested this 3 gigabyte version of the GP 107 architecture is a good example of how important the memory subsystem is and how much of an influence it can have on performance under certain conditions in some instances the bandwidth RUP throughput and reduction of cache capacity how little impact when compared to the 1050 Ti but in some of the performance it was massive for those reasons simply naming this product at the gtx 1053 gigabyte isn't good enough in my opinion thankfully though this isn't another GT 1030 ddr4 situation as the 3 gigabyte model is arguably better values than the original 2 gigabyte version but still there is some risk of misleading consumers here it's hard to say exactly why NVIDIA has released this product especially being that so late in the game that said this release did happen during the cryptocurrency mining boom and with the gtx 1050 TI being a popular choice amongst - perhaps this was a way of boosting stock levels by selling defective GPUs if you're desperate for a new graphics card and you have around 100 to $150 us to spend then the 3 gigabyte 1050 is one of the best options available right now personally though I would certainly recommend that you hold off buying a new graphics card all at this point if you can we do have new graphics cards in coming very soon so yeah just keep that in mind hopefully though we will see the 3 gigabyte and the 2 gigabyte models creeping down to 110 dollar US MSRP in the coming weeks so for those of you that are super desperate for any reverie scarred can just get one because after all the new graphics cards will likely see sort of the almost flagship product come in and then they'll trickle down months later so it might be anywhere from four to six months after the initial next-gen product release that you get sort of a 1050 equivalent $100 $250 u.s. graphics card and that is going to do it for this one another benchmark video done so hopefully it was a success hopefully you guys enjoyed it if you did you know what to do is that little thumb up thing you hit that one hit that one if you feel like it wasn't very good but you know it 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