Gadgetory

hey guys I'm back Matt let me out of the benchmarking lab this week to help him out the 10:50 launch and I'm pretty excited to see what end videos new entry-level GPUs have to offer us you may have noticed what I have here isn't the 1050 but rather MSI's gaming Z graphics card it's the 1080 model and a very very powerful very efficient graphics card a lot of gamers would love to have one of these in their rig but not everyone does because they cost several hundred US dollars and even if you can afford one not everyone's going to justify spending that kind of money just to play games I mean that is a lot of money so that's why both AMD and NVIDIA have the entry-level guys currently at the moment that probably the best entry-level card is AMD's rx 460 and 110 for the 2gig model it's extremely good value it's better than the 950 or the 750 Ti from last generation they're both still great graphics cards but the newer rx 460 just has a bit more to offer at the price and today Nvidia will be finally taking it to AMD with their Pascal 1050 Ti so let's take a look at it it's a nice little very little card it's the first thing that jumps out it was actually have tiny the graphics card is and I'll just get that out of the way actually one of the reasons why I have this thing on hand just to show you just how small the 1052 eye really is I mean if that gives you some idea there are the two cards side-by-side this little fella it is a hundred and seventy seven millimeters long total length that is the PCB is just 150 millimeters long so a compact card overall it's also very very light which probably won't surprise many of you Before we jump to the benchmarks we'll check out your game performance thermals power consumption all that good stuff be sure to check out Matt's review on the vanilla card here or rather pulley oops it's probably more up here get that and once you've checked that out come back and we'll get on with this thing all right now that we've taken a quick look at MSI's gtx 1050 TI let's rip off that cooler to get a better look at the PCB and while we're at it we might even take a peek at that cheeky little heatsink the entire card weighs just 329 grams which is almost three times less than most mid-range to high-end graphics cards including the fan plastic shroud and tiny aluminium heatsink the cooler totals 193 grams the heatsink measures just 95 millimeters long 90 millimeters tall and 18 millimeters thick it also tips the scales just 118 grams I've seen tablets with bigger heat sinks like the standard 1050 the ti model doesn't require an external 6 pin PCI Express connector and MSI hasn't felt the need to include one which I quite like they have also stuck with a basic 3+1 power phase design though this should be more than enough to keep the 75 watt TDP card happy unlike the standard 1050 the ti model uses the full GP 107 silicon and this means 12 working SM units allow you to pack 20% more criticals for a grand total of 768 there are also 48 TM use and 3200 PS Nvidia set the default clock specifications at 1290 megahertz for the base clock and 1392 megahertz for the boost clock MSI is beefed up these frequencies are tab by pushing the base to thirteen hundred and forty-one megahertz resulting in a boost frequency of fourteen hundred and fifty-five megahertz this is a five percent overclock so we aren't expecting any huge improvements here all 1050 TI cars will come fitted with four gigabytes of gddr5 memory clocked at 1750 megahertz and msi hasn't tinkered with the operating frequency here armed with what seems like a rather inadequate 128-bit wide memory bus the 1052 eye grubs data from the memory at a rate of one hundred and twelve gigabytes per second this is the same memory bandwidth available to the RX 460 which also boasts a 128-bit wide memory bus getting back to the MSI card we find at the i/o end there's a DisplayPort 1.4 HDMI 2.0 and link DVI port these outputs should have most users well covered and all three can be used simultaneously if need be alright so at this point we've pretty much covered all the important stuff before jumping in the benchmarks a few quick notes on the testing many of you have requested that we use our skylake core i3 test machine for this review rather than the beefy core i7 rig this is something we've done the past four sub hundred alla graphics card reviews and again we feel it makes the most sense here the latest AMD and NVIDIA drivers were use for testing and while the results for other cards such as the rx 460 have been carried over from previous tests we did go through the results with updated drivers and made changes where need be for the most part though things stayed much the same okay finally the moment you guys have all been waiting for the benchmarks let's get to it where else would we start but battlefield one yes we did test using DirectX 11 but know we aren't trying to make Nvidia look good here so please put those pitchforks down in our opinion the DirectX 12 implementation is a little too buggy at the moment and both AMD and NVIDIA GPU suffer from regular dips in performance so this is why we're sticking with DirectX 11 for now the game is extremely well optimized using DirectX 11 and runs like a treat and hardware from both teams the GTX 10:50 managed to edge out the 950 which isn't bad but we did see much more impressive performance from the ti model the 18% boost in performance took the average frame rate from 49 frames per second 258 frames a second this meant that 1052 I was five percent faster than 960 and not a great deal slower than the r9 380 quite an impressive result then for those of you who simply couldn't forgive us for testing battlefield one using the DirectX 11 API maybe you can forgive us because we've included Deus Ex mankind divided here the 1052 I was 15% faster than the vanilla 1050 but more importantly matched the rx for 64 gig card even with the medium quality settings enabled performance he wasn't exactly stellar and a massive step forward can be seen when moving to the r9 380 doom with Vulcan yet we're trying to keep everyone happy here doing really loath 2 gigabyte graphics cards and for that reason the standard 1050 struggles a little with the minimums that said we are gaming at tallie p with the game virtually maxed out so a 47 FPS minimum still very acceptable still this makes the 1052 eyes 73 FPS minimum even more impressive and despite using Vulcan it was still able to best to the rx for 64 gig card so a big win for Nvidia here in Gears of War for the 1052 I might have only been 11 percent faster an average one compared to the base model 1050 but that was enough of a boost to reach 60 FPS on average it also meant that the ti was 25% faster than the rx 460 that said it was still 7% slower than the GTX 960 and 12% slower than the r9 380 even I was wondering why we bothered testing mafia 3 really the only reason we include this game because well let's be honest the optimization is shocking is the fact that it is a newly released title and it is quite a bit of fun to play using the low preset I know right low freakin Hal we have read just 43 frames a second with the 1050 Ti this placed on par with the r9 380 X and as such meant that it was 30% faster than the rx 460 Mirror's Edge catalyst is a great quality game and here the 1050 - I was 12% faster than the standard 1050 rendering 66 FPS on average also meant the TI was 32% fast in the RX 460 and just 4% slower than the r9 380 interestingly it was also 6% faster than the GTX 960 I realize these new GPUs aren't going to have any issues with overwatch that said as a super competitive first-person shooter game is crave high frame rates in this title so being able to push well over 60 FPS using the ultra quality settings at 1080p is a nice luxury the 1050 - I certainly deliver T averaging 113 frames per second and never dipping below 99 FPS this made at 55% faster than the rx for 60 full gig card finally before getting the overclocking power consumption and temps we're going to take a quick look at the frame rate performance in quantum break this is another controversial title we've tested with since we're using the steam version which limits us to DirectX 11 testing here the 1050 - I have rige 75 frames a second using the medium quality preset and this was obviously very playable shockingly though this meant that the 1050 - I was 60% faster than the rx 460 as far as I can tell this is a bit like the battlefield 1 situation the AMD graphics card sliver much the same performance you DirectX 11 with the Steam version as they do with DirectX 12 in the Windows Store version meanwhile the geforce cards pretty much suck using DirectX 12 but they're much stronger using steams DirectX 11 version using MSI Afterburner we overclocked the core to a base frequency of fifteen hundred and fifty-two megahertz which gave us a boost clock of sixteen hundred and sixty-five megahertz the memory went from 750 megahertz to 1927 megahertz this saw the 1050 TR operating it between 1860 to 1900 megahertz when gaming as a result we saw a mile six percent performance gain in Gears of War for taking the average frame rate from 60fps to 64 fps so not an earth-shattering result here but a free performance bump all the same testing with battlefield 1 we saw a better 8 percent performance gain from overclock and that was enough to match the 960 so not a bad result here then I've been very keen to check out the power consumption figures and the 1050 Ti doesn't disappoint here our entire core i3 rig consume just 118 watts when paired with the 1050 Ti and that's gaming consumption folks so basically you're looking at similar power consumption to the already efficient gtx 750ti the 1050 doesn't make the rx 460 look bad but then again it was consistently faster and did allow the system consume 20% less power the msi 1054 gig OC features a heatsink with less surface area than my smartphone even though it is only tasked with keeping a 75 watt TDP rated GPU cool it's still very small nevertheless operating temperatures were kept in check and they never exceeded 72 degrees in our gaming tests more importantly it was barely audible and certainly couldn't be heard over existing case fans when overclock temperatures only increased by a few degrees and the fan only spun up ever so slightly right so for now we're considering this is more of a preview because the big 20 plus game performance breakdown is still to come soon we'll be comparing the 10 52 gig head-to-head against the rx 462 gig and then of course the 1050 TI 4 gig versus the RX 4 64 gig and I might even sneak in the RX 417 of that comparison because I think that makes sense as well for now let's take a look at the cost per frame data based on the small sample of games just tested fully aware that some of the Gamze didn't come out named deez favor well in fact quite the opposite was true this won't be our final conclusion that said the new rx 470 which we have priced at the 170 dollar MSRP comes out at a rather impressive $1 and 88 cents per frame making it one of the better value options here the GTX 1063 also looks quite good as well the GTX 1050 Ti is on par with the three gig 1060 so that's good news especially since it seems to wipe the floor with a m-- DS rx 460 range even with the updated price cuts taken into account we're still for AMD the vanilla 1050 comes in at a much lower cost per frame while delivering more frames overall for those of you who don't find the scatterplot that easy to digest we have hacked together a bar graph that tries to illustrate the situation in more simplified manner this isn't really the correct way to show you this data but we are aware quite a few of you prefer this method anyway you can plainly see that the RX 460 Series cost more per frame while delivering less frames overall as for Emma's eyes cute little 1050 TI OC graphics card we rather like it the fact that it can still be overclocked to squeeze out say 6 to 8% more performance we have the need for an external power connector is just awesome it also ran a very reasonable temperatures and generated very little noise for those are rocking older systems with slightly dodgy power supplies this new graphics card might be the answer alright guys that's all from me on this one I hope you really enjoyed this review and please be sure to keep an eye on those upcoming hair day comparisons they ought to be good