NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti are clearly aimed at the low-cost graphics card segment, which sells high volumes, mostly to casual gamers. AMD has had a very strong position here with cards like the R9 380 and RX 460. AMD also recently introduced a price drop for the RX 470 to ensure they stay on top, which won't be the case if NVIDIA's aggressive entry into the sub-$150 segment with the GTX 1050 Ti comes to fruition. Under the hood, both the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti introduce a small revolution; instead of working with their decade-long partner TSMC, NVIDIA opted for Samsung's 14 nanometer production process for their GP107 graphics processor. This not only lets them optimize cost, but also saves TSMC 16 nm capacity for bigger chips that bring in more profit.

MSI has overclocked their GTX 1050 Gaming X by a decent amount, which should roughly provide a 5% performance increase over reference clocks. Unfortunately, we don't have any reference-clocked cards, so the exact number is unknown. Averaged over our performance suite, the MSI GTX 1050 is about 15% faster than the GTX 950, matching the aging GTX 960. Compared to AMD's RX 460, the performance increase is about 10%; the card is a whopping 50% behind the RX 470 and the difference to the GTX 1050 Ti is roughly 20%. This means that you won't be able to play the latest AAA titles with maximum settings at 1080p with the GTX 1050; rather, you will end up running something close to the lowest details in even less demanding games like DOTA, and certainly in Overwatch.

Just like all other Pascal GPUs, power consumption of the GTX 1050 Series is outstanding, showing NVIDIA's clear lead over AMD in this metric. With only 3 watts in non-gaming states, power consumption when not gaming is also extremely low - lower than on any other graphics card we have seen before. Gaming power consumption is also very modest, staying below 75 W at all times, which will work well when it comes to upgrading older pre-built systems that usually come with weak power supplies. MSI added an extra 6-pin power connector to their card (the reference design relies on PCIe bus power only). I'm not 100% convinced if doing so was necessary for the majority of users, but it could help when doing serious overclocking with power limit increases.

MSI is using their famous TwinFrozr thermal solution on the Gaming X, but in a cost-optimized version with just one heatpipe. Still, thanks to GP107's incredible power efficiency and MSI's well-tuned fan profile in BIOS, the cooler is good enough to provide almost inaudible gaming once the card is installed into a case. The fans also include the idle-fan-off feature which stops the fans in idle and light gaming for a noise-free experience during Internet browsing and productivity.

Overclocking on both our GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti cards was more problematic than on previous products. It looks as though NVIDIA has capped memory overclocking to 2002 MHz. GPU overclocking is limited too, to a maximum boost clock of 1911 MHz. However, this feature doesn't seem to be implemented correctly as clocks beyond that will provide more GPU performance with the displayed number staying at 1911 MHz. We have not received any information from NVIDIA on whether this is a bug or working as intended to limit overclocking potential for a large enough gap to the GTX 1060 series. We tested three drivers, including yesterday's public 375.63 WHQL, and they all show the same behavior; let's hope this gets addressed in the near future.

MSI's pricing for the GTX 1050 Gaming X is set to be around $130, which is $20 more than the "starting at $110" price provided by NVIDIA. In my opinion, this increase is way too big because it pushes the card to where any cheap GTX 1050 Ti is the better option due to higher performance at the same price point. Another option could be to look at the used market, which has a lot going on due to those who bought latest-generation cards and are now trying to offload their old stuff at bargain pricing. The RX 460 made little sense to me back at release, and it doesn't make much sense now either. I pretty much feel the same about the GTX 1050 non-Ti; its gaming performance is simply too low for anything serious. Please do yourself a favor and save up a little more money to get something like the GTX 1050 Ti or maybe the RX 470 - it will make a huge difference, no matter which games you play.