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NVIDIA announces the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti for gamers on a budget

By Koh Wanzi - on 18 Oct 2016, 9:00pm

NVIDIA announces the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti for gamers on a budget

Image Source: ASUS

NVIDIA has taken the wraps off the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti, two brand new cards aimed at the budget segment of the market. These cards round out an impressive Pascal-based line-up that comprises some of the best cards we’ve seen in recent years, including cards like the GeForce GTX 1080.

More importantly, the new Pascal cards are NVIDIA’s answer to the likes of AMD’s Radeon RX 400 series cards, and provide consumers looking for the best bang for their buck with even more choice.

Both cards are based on the new GP107 GPU that's sized down to serve the mainstream market and are built to deliver at least 60fps in popular e-sports titles like Overwatch and Dota 2 at 1080p and High settings. According to the company, the GeForce GTX 1050 is up to three times as powerful as the four-year-old GeForce GTX 650, and 50 per cent faster than the GeForce GTX 750 Ti.

That said, NVIDIA claims you’ll be able to run AAA games like Grand Theft Auto V and Gears of War 4 at around 60fps as well, provided you turn the settings down to Medium.

Here’s a table summarizing the key specifications of both cards:

Graphics Card

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

GPU

GP107

GP107

Process

16nm FinFET

16nm FinFET

Transistors

3.3 billion

3.3 billion

CUDA cores

 640

768

GPU base clock speeds

1,354MHz

1,290MHz

GPU boost clock speeds

1,455MHz 

1,392MHz

 Memory

 2GB GDDR5

4GB GDDR5

 Memory clock speed

7,000MHz

7,000MHz

Memory bus width

 128-bit

128-bit

Memory bandwidth

 112GB/s

 112GB/s

TDP

 75W

75W

Price

US$109

US$139

No Founders Edition models are available this time, and both cards will be available on 25 October directly from NVIDIA’s board partners.

Thanks to its 75 watt TDP, the card can be powered without any need for external PCIe power connectors, although custom cards may feature additional connectors to increase the overclocking headroom. Despite its target audience, NVIDIA says the card actually overclocks quite well, even hitting up to 1.9GHz during its own internal testing.

However, there is no support for SLI, much like the GeForce GTX 1060. And from the pictures of the custom cards we’ve seen, many are compact cards targeted at mini-ITX systems.

At US$109, the GeForce GTX 1050 goes head to head with the identically priced Radeon RX 460. On the other hand, the Radeon RX 470 is actually more expensive than the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti at US$179 (rumors say a price drop is incoming in response to NVIDIA's launch), but we’ll be running a comparisons feature in the near future to assess how these cards stack up against each other.

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