MSI GeForce GTX 1050 & 1050 Ti Gaming X Review - Introduction

MSI GeForce GTX 1050 2GB & 1050 Ti 4GB GAMING X
Entry level gaming at an attractive price

Last week Nvidia announced the GeForce GTX 1050 series, with two primary models. In this article we'll review the MSI GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti Gaming X, two graphics cards aimed at the budget minded consumer. We say budget minded as these cards are very affordable and positioned in an attractive 109 and 139 dollar (US) segment. The 1050 series is Nvidia's answer to the Radeon RX 460 with the Ti models perhaps winking and waving at the Radeon RX 470 from AMD.

These new GeForce GTX 1050 graphics cards are once again based on Pascal, fabbed with fins (FinFET) on an even smaller node, 14nm. As it turns out, the smaller fabrication process works out really well for Nvidia as they have been able to cram 3.3 Billion transistors into a very tiny 132 mm² chip. The 1060, 1070 and 1080 have been a high-clocked success story ever since their launch. The new GeForce GTX 1050 and GeForce GTX 1050 Ti should suit gamers on a budget. Please note that there is no Founders Edition of the GTX 1050 (2GB) or 1050 Ti (4GB), you will only see board partner models. Based upon a GP107 GPU the top model "Ti" SKUs will get 768 shader processors. The entry-level "regular" 1050 model will get 640 shader processors. By itself it's nothing to dream about when you read the specs, but 16 and now 14 nm has been treating Nvidia well, and as such you are going to notice fast clocked models and if you tweak a little, you should be able to reach that 1.9, maybe 2.0 GHz marker on the GPU Boost frequency. The cards will cost 109 and 139 dollars (US) respectively. 

With 640 shader processors it means the GPU has five (1050 model) or six (768 shader processor for the 1050 Ti model) SMs active (six streaming multi-processors x (2x64) 128 shader cores). The cards will be equipped with 128-bit memory as well, in either a 2 GB or 4 GB model, though we do recommend the 4 GB models to be a bit more future proof. That memory is tied to a 128-bit wide bus locked in at 1,752 MHz which is 7 GHz (GDDR5-effective) at a memory bandwidth of 112 GB/s. For this review we are testing the MSI GAMING X models. The MSI GAMING X version obviously comes with a tweak or two with a TwinFrozr VI cooler and custom PCB design. We'll talk about the precise specs on these puppies during the photo shoot.

 
MSI GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti series with the Nvidia GP107-A1 GPU.