Introduction

The sub-$200 market-segment has been NVIDIA's problem area in terms of price-performance competitiveness with AMD, even though the company has had higher volumes. Most games released for the competitive gaming crowd run great on sub-$300 graphics cards, and it's only blockbuster AAA titles with cutting-edge production designs that prompt people to invest in faster graphics solutions, where NVIDIA has established an unbeatable lead.

NVIDIA is getting hawkish and wants itself a bigger slice of the sub-$200 market segment targeting e-Sports players. The company launched the $139.99 GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and $109.99 GTX 1050 earlier this month. The two SKUs are based on NVIDIA's smallest implementation of its "Pascal" GPU architecture, the GP107 silicon. This tiny chip packs up to 768 CUDA cores, 48 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 128-bit GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory on the GTX 1050 Ti.

These are still "Pascal" CUDA cores that tick at 1.35-1.45 GHz. NVIDIA's decision to go with a 128-bit wide memory bus shows that the GTX 1050 Ti has been built to a cost (with no more than four memory chips), which prepares NVIDIA for a price war with the better-endowed, but costlier to make AMD offerings. NVIDIA managed to get the power consumption of the GTX 1050 Ti below the 75W mark, which makes it capable of sustaining itself on slot power alone. Its nearest rival from AMD, the Radeon RX 470 4 GB, needs an additional 6-pin PCIe power connector to feed its 120W TDP setup.



Palit's GeForce GTX 1050 Ti KalmX is of a rare breed. It comes without any fans, which delivers the perfect noise-free experience, greatly suited for a media PC that can handle gaming, too. The card also doesn't require additional power connector(s), which will help with power supplies of small form factor cases since such units often don't provide additional PCIe power cables. Palit chose not to include any overclocking, which seems reasonable given the passive design, but our overclocking section shows that overclocking is definitely possible with this card. In Europe, the GTX 1050 Ti KalmX is listed for around € 150. Since Palit's products are not available in the US, we converted the price to $160 for our comparison graphs.