Palit's GeForce GTX 1050 Ti is a unique product because it is the only GTX 1050 Ti graphics card on the market that's passively cooled (fanless). This also makes it the fastest passively cooled card available, with the next-closest competition being passively cooled XFX Radeon RX 460 models, which offer much lower performance, though.

Palit has chosen to run their card at reference clocks, which is a reasonable choice. In our testing, we see performance matching the GTX 1050 Ti reference nearly exactly, which suggests an identical Boost configuration, too. Performance-wise, this makes the card 25% faster than the GTX 1050 non-Ti, sitting roughly between the RX 460 (30% slower) and RX 470 (33% faster). The next-fastest NVIDIA SKU, the GTX 1060 3 GB, is around 50% faster. This means the GTX 1050 Ti will only be able to deliver a constant 60 FPS in the latest titles if you sacrifice some details settings - not a lot, depending on the title.

Palit's thermal solution seems well engineered and does a good job at keeping the card from overheating. We tested in a case with some airflow, but also gave the card a spin in a case with zero airflow and no way for warm air to escape. In the latter scenario, the card did reach 83°C, which meant clocks went down to baseclock, which isn't terribly bad. The surprising thing was that both temperature and clocks were stable at that point no matter what gaming tests we ran. Media playback, which has a phenomenal power consumption of only 4 W, should as such work just fine in a zero-airflow scenario.

Generally, power consumption is excellent, with negligible power draw in non-gaming scenarios. Once you start gaming, power draw goes up to 55-60 W, which is still very impressive, making this card the most power-efficient board we have ever tested - no doubt thanks to NVIDIA's fantastic "Pascal" architecture. Such low power consumption is the foundation for Palit being able to build this passive card. It also enabled them to put no additional power connector on the card: all power is drawn from the PCI-Express slot since it can supply up to 75 W.

With roughly 60 W power draw at stock, we found enough power headroom to do some overclocking. Here, the card really shines and reaches clock frequencies that rival typical air-cooled, custom-design GTX 1050 Ti variants. In the end, we were able to overclock the GPU by 16% and the memory by 28%, which resulted in a 16% real-life performance increase, nearly matching RX 470 performance.

Unfortunately, Palit's products are not available in the United States. European pricing is €150 (including VAT). At that price point, the card is €15 more expensive than the cheapest GTX 1050 Ti, which is not unreasonable for such a unique card. Low-noise enthusiasts will definitely be willing to pay this premium. Other alternatives exist, however. You could go with a card that has the idle fan-off feature, which will provide zero noise during idle and media playback and only spin up the fans when gaming. This would let you pick a RX 470 / GTX 1060 class card for significantly more performance. Another option could be the passive XFX RX 460; considerably cheaper at €110, its gaming performance is severely lacking, though that might be acceptable if you focus on light gaming only.

Personally, I'll stash the GTX 1050 Ti away in my living room media PC, where I'm sure it will provide an outstanding movie-watching experience, one without any distracting fan noise.