Introduction

AMD has historically been strong in the sub-$200 graphics card market, and its focus on capturing key price points between $250 and all the way down to $100 with its latest "Polaris" architecture shows just how important this market has become. Besides affordability, these graphics cards are priced to cater to the competitive e-Sports market, which marked the single biggest revival of PC gaming. These games run great on sub-$300 graphics cards, and anything above those is overkill. Only blockbuster AAA titles with cutting-edge production designs warrant spending more money on expensive graphics cards. NVIDIA has all but captured this market with its GeForce 10 series.

Integrated graphics solutions have come a long way. Succeeding generations of Intel processors (eg: Haswell vs. Skylake) have shown bigger leaps in integrated GPU performance than CPU core performance. AMD has also used its richer GPU IP than Intel to good effect and armed its processors with the latest Graphics CoreNext tech that supports async-compute, FreeSync, etc. These advancements from Intel and AMD spelled doom for discrete GPUs below a certain price range. The $60-ish entry level graphics cards have all but vanished. The new breed of e-Sports games have breathed life back into the viability of $100 graphics cards.

Before titles like "Overwatch" and "Paragon," you had e-Sports titles that ran on pretty much any graphics solution (eg: "DOTA 2," which runs fine on IGPs). The new MOBA titles need certain amounts of GPU power, but not too much. Something like a GTX 1070 would be way overkill for e-Sports gaming builds; at the same time, an integrated GPU would be underpowered. You wouldn't want frame drops when hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money are on the line. Hence, the sub-$200 market has been sliced across several price points, beginning with the one set at $100-$110. AMD's offering in this segment is the Radeon RX 460, which, after its recent price-cut, goes for $99.99.

NVIDIA launched the new GeForce GTX 1050 at $109, alongside the more powerful GTX 1050 Ti, which starts at $139. This card is based on NVIDIA's smallest GPU based on the "Pascal" architecture, the GP107. It has fewer CUDA cores than the GTX 1050 Ti, although NVIDIA saw it fit to clock the card higher. The card has 640 out of the 768 CUDA cores present on the chip, and 40 out of 48 TMUs, yet an untouched 32 ROPs and a 128-bit GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB of memory. Its power consumption should be lower still than the GTX 1050 Ti, although NVIDIA has rated its TDP at 75W. You're more likely to see GTX 1050 rather than GTX 1050 Ti cards without any power connectors.



In this review, we are testing the MSI GeForce GTX 1050 Gaming X, a premium custom design graphics card by MSI that combines a factory-overclocked GTX 1050 implementation with the company's signature Twin Frozr cooling solution, which turns its fans off when the GPU is idling, and there is a custom-design PCB that features an additional 6-pin PCIe power connector to help bolster the card's overclocking headroom.

Architecture

The GeForce GTX 1050 and its sibling, the GTX 1050 Ti, are based on NVIDIA's smallest silicon from the "Pascal" family, the GP107. With a die-area of 132 mm² and a transistor count of 3.3 billion, this chip is tiny, and has been built with very clear cost objectives in mind.



NVIDIA has still made sure that unless a design choice doesn't substantially deviate from its cost objectives, it will implement it. A good example of this is the fact that the GP107 silicon, despite featuring just 768 CUDA cores spread across six streaming multiprocessors (SMs), is split into two graphics processing clusters (GPCs) of three SMs, each. Five out of six SMs are enabled on the GTX 1050, which works out to a CUDA core count of 640.

The decision to spread six streaming multiprocessors across two GPCs means that three SMs share a Raster Engine, specialized units with geometry/tessellation units. The streaming multiprocessor, the indivisible subunit of the GPU, is identical in design to the ones featured on NVIDIA's fastest TITAN X Pascal graphics cards. Each packs 128 CUDA cores, a PolyMorph Engine, and dedicated geometry processing components. The two GPCs are cushioned by a 1 MB L2 cache wired to a new-generation GigaThread Engine, the traffic-cop of the GPU, and there is a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.



At its reference clock speeds, the GPU has 112 GB/s of memory bandwidth at its disposal. This is bolstered by NVIDIA's lossless memory compression tech, which should increase effective bandwidth in a small but significant way. On the GTX 1080, NVIDIA claims this gain is up to 20 percent in the best-case scenario. Something like that would certainly come in handy for the GTX 1050.



The "Pascal" architecture supports Asynchronous Compute as standardized by Microsoft. It adds to that with its own variation of the concept with "Dynamic Load Balancing."

Packaging

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Documentation

The Card

The MSI GTX 1050 Gaming X follows the company's red and black theme introduced with the most recent TwinFrozr coolers. A backplate is not available and doesn't make much sense in this low-cost market segment. Dimensions of the card are 23.0 cm x 13.0 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include a DVI port, an HDMI port, and a DisplayPort. Unlike previous NVIDIA cards, the DVI port no longer includes an analog signal, so you'll have to use an active adapter. NVIDIA also updated DisplayPort to be 1.2 certified and 1.3/1.4 ready, which enables support for 4K @ 120 Hz and 5K @ 60 Hz or 8K @ 60 Hz with two cables.

The GPU also comes with an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 2.0b compatible, which supports HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies. The GPU video encoding unit has been updated to support HEVC at 10-bit and 12-bit.


The GeForce GTX 1050 Series does not support SLI.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back).