Gigabyte GTX 1050 Ti G1 Gaming Review

Nvidia took the market by storm with its Pascal graphics cards that brought out an unprecedented performance to power consumption ratio! With the mighty Titan X sitting on top of the mountain as the ultimate fancy of every gamer, the GTX 1080 followed by the GTX 1070 fuel the mid to high end market. While the GTX 1060 6GB and the recent 3GB edition are great cards the budget market was still craving for a Pascal card aimed strictly at 1080p gaming and nothing more.
The answer came in the form of the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050Ti the bottom most step on the Pascal ladder. I know its late but I couldn't resist myself from reviewing one more of the GTX 1050Tis out there especially if its the finest looking one of them all. Today we'll be reviewing the Gigabyte GTX 1050Ti Gaming G1 OC Edition Graphics Card from Gigabyte India and also be adding the final piece of the puzzle to our GTX 1050Tis review lineup!

Just like the reference GTX 1050Ti this card even packs up to 768 CUDA cores, 48 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 128-bit GDDR5 memory interface topped up by a 4 GB GDDR5 VRAM. Gigabyte GTX 1050Ti Gaming G1 is the top of the line card in its segment and comes with a custom PCB, the signature dual fan setup called Windforce 2X and a 6-pin PCIe power connector to aid in reaching its clock frequency of 1367Mhz. The memory is at stock frequency of 1752Mhz though.

Packing and Closer Look

Packing wise the Gigabyte GTX 1050Ti Gaming G1 OC is similar to its smaller cousins and follows the same color scheme as the entire Gigabyte VGA lineup. Front is mainly occupied by the Gigabyte Gaming G1 eye logo which is all orange and lit, don't worry this one won't stare in your soul! Vital information such as RGB support, windforece cooling, OC edition etc are mentioned neatly at the bottom left corner.

At the back we have two main features printed quite boldly as if Gigabyte wants you to nail them inside your head. Firstly about the Windforce2X cooling solution and how it works along with the fans and the whole heatsink installation. Secondly we have the GPU Gauntlet sorting system which basically means that Gigabyte has handpicked or binned the GPU to ensure higher clock speed both by default and by manual overclocking for sustainable and richer performance, we'll see to the overclocking part ourselves later on though.

Open the box and you'll find the accessories inside a thin black box seated above the molded cardboard containing the card. The bundled accessories include, driver CD and a quick setup guide. Sadly there are no decals included which I was expecting from a top tier card.

Closer Looks and Features

Gigabyte has opted for the familiar color scheme that it came out with for the 10 series graphics card and looks nothing less than premium from the sheer looks itself. Its a tiny card though measuring in at just 229x118x40mm.

The color scheme is black with orange which is really catchy and gives the card a distinctive yet colorful look. Top shroud is angular at places inspired from the stealth design of airplanes I suppose with a combination of smooth & textured plastic.

At the back its not only surprising to find a solid backplate which is uncommon for such small cards but its more so angular and colored to gel in with the entire color and design theme of the card! Also there is no warranty void sticker at the back screws making it an ideal card for people who indulge into DIY hobbies or modding.
While the backplate does add a ton of aesthetics appeal it is a bit unnecessary over here and could've been avoided to cut down on the extra cost sweetening the deal further on.

Its a dual slot card & looking at the connectivity options we see that its a dual slot card with a DVI port, three HDMI port, and one DisplayPort. The HDMI port is 2.0b and the Display Ports are 1.3 HBR3/1.4 HDR ready. All this especially the three HDMI ports make it one of the most loaded card in terms of connectivity.

To power this nifty little power house you need a 6-pin power connector so theoretically this card can reach upto 150W of peak power consumption which indicated to a promising overclocking headroom! No SLI support is provided for the GTX 1050 Ti

Also at the top end there are two LED back lit areas namely as the Gigabyte Logo and the Fan Stop indicator. While the Gigabyte Logo is always on by default the Fan Stop indicator is only lit when the fans are off either by the user or by the default settings. You can customize these LEDs to the color of your choice as well as determine the pattern in which they'll glow like pulsating, still, breathing, random colors etc,

The Windforce2X cooling system incorporates dual 90mm alternate-spinning fans with the unique blade design and two 6mm composite copper heat pipes in direct touch to the GPU, keeping the card cool and quiet even when aggressively overclocked.

Gigabyte claims that the airflow is spilt by the triangle fan edge, and guided smoothly through the 3D stripe curve on the fan surface, effectively enhancing the air flow by 23% over traditional fans. These '3D Active Fans' fans don't spin at all as long as the temperatures are under 60°C after which they gradually spin wrt the temperature.

At the center we have the GP107 Pascal GPU based on the newer 14nm technology unlike the 16nm on which all other Pascal GPUs are based upon.

To power the GTX 1050Ti Gigabyte went for Samsung GDDR5 memory chips and are model number K4G80325FB-HC28. These run at 1750 MHz (7000 MHz GDDR5 effective) and are 1GB each in capacity.

Benchmarks and Overclocking

Installing the Gigabyte GTX 1050Ti Gaming G1 was easy and it powered up like a breeze once we booted up the system.
GPUZ reported the correct frequencies with 1367Mhz on the clock and 1752Mhz on the memory.
For the benchmarks we used the following test setup configuration --
CPU: Intel Core i7 7700K 4.2Ghz
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z270X Designare
RAM: ADATA XPG Dazzle 16GB DDR4 3000Mhz Memory Kit
Cooler: Corsair H100i GTX (Push Pull Configuration)
Graphics Card: Gigabyte GTX 1050 Ti G1 Gaming 4GB OC
Storage: ADATA XPG SX950 240GB SSD
Power Supply: Corsair AX860i 860W 80+ Platinum
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
GPU Driver: ForceWare 375.70

Overclocking the Gigabyte GTX 1050Ti was a simple process and using the Xtreme Engine Utility from Gigabyte or any other utility for that matter yielded the same results. The highest frequency with respect to performance gains that we could obtain on our sample was 1502Mhz on the clock and 2002Mhz on the memory, anything above this either gave poor results, white dots or even system freeze.
Note that the card is highly compatible with third party apps and I didn't face any issues to control the fan speed or while over clocking even if I used any other utility. gigabyte's own Xtreme Engine Utility is more than enough though but still if you are more comfortable with something else then go ahead with it.

AIDA64 Extreme Edition GPGPU

The AIDA64 GPGPU test not only calculates the read, write and copy speed of the graphics card and processor but is also very useful in observing the SHA-1 Hash and AES-256 score. These are indications of how well the GPU can handle number crunching or real life image or video rendering. Higher score shows a better card.

The results seen over here are extremely impressive for a budget oriented card.

Unigine Heaven 4.0 and Unigine Valley 1.0

A compilation of 26 beautiful scenes rendered and run via the raw GPU power of the system. It emulates any game or graphical work that you'll perform on the system scoring it on various parameter. We ran the test on Custom preset and settings at 1920x1080 resolution, quality to ultra and extreme tessellation.

These two benchmarks utilize the full 4GB VRAM on the GTX 1050Ti hence quite an accurate real-world rendering power can be made out from the results.

3D Mark Fire Strike

Fire Strike by 3D Mark is a test suit that plays a cinematic scene to determine the FPS, GPU temperature and CPU temperature scaling everything via a cumulative score. It is a great tool to benchmark your GPU since the render is mostly GPU & memory dependent.

3D Mark 11 Professional Edition

Another variant of the Fire Strike by 3D Mark, used mainly for scoring the GPU performance.

Crysis 3

I can't start gaming benchmarks without running my all time favorites Crysis 3 but its a game that no system loves! The CryEngine 3 behind this scenic beauty can bring down any system to its knees and I mean any system. I set everything to Ultra at 1920x1080 resolution with MSAA 4X and motion blur high.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

The latest installation of Lara Croft in the spectacular Rise of the Tomb Raider 2016 with stunning graphics and rich location makes it a great game to benchmark with while enjoying in the due course! We used DX12 and settings were at Ultimate on full HD resolution.

Battlefield 1

The latest installation to the Battlefield franchise and mind it the grandest one of them all aswell, Battlefield 1 is a prequel to the infamous Battlefield 1942 placing the players right in the middle of World War 1. Based on the latest Frostbite Engine by EA-DICE, Battlefield 1 takes advantage of DirectX 12 with asynchronous compute to weave together richly detailed worlds. It is heavily taxing on current-generation hardware, and you're handsomely rewarded for investing more into your graphics setup. Settings are at Ultra preset with full HD resolution.

Batman Arkham Knight

Since the game is powered by Epic's Unreal Engine 3 and supports DX11 tessellation so playing this game on 1920x1080 resolution with all settings maxed out can be any modern system's 'worst nightmare'!

Fallout 4

Fallout 4 takes place in post-apocalyptic Boston in the year 2287, 210 years after a Nuclear war. Bethesda's Creation Engine drives the game's strong first- and third-person presentation. The game takes advantage of DirectX 11 and can be highly taxing on most of the PC hardware. At full HD resolution shadow quality was set to high along with everything else cranked to max.

Far Cry Primal

A game that takes the concept of going back in time a bit too far, set in pre-historic central Europe where man is still fighting the forces of nature to become the dominant species on Earth. Based on Ubisoft's latest Dunia Engine, the game takes advantage of DirectX 11 and is heavily taxing on high-end GPUs. We used Very High preset at 1920x1080 resolution since that's what is considered the sweet spot for this game.

Ashes of the Singularity

Developed by Oxide Games & running on the Nitrous Game Engine Ashes of the Singularity is a real-time strategy game set in the future where descendants of humans (called Post- Humans) and a powerful artificial intelligence (called the Substrate) fight a war for control of a resource known as Turinium.
We've used the in-built benchmarking tool and the result is shown in an average of all the graphical tests conducted over various locations and topographies of the game. DX12 API, Quality set to Extreme, 4xMSAA and everything else to high.

Hitman 2016

Agent 47 is back and in this sixth installation of the infamous Hitman series everything is notched up ranging from gameplay to graphic engine. The game uses an in-house game engine by IO Interactive called the Glacier game engine that is one of the first to leverage DirectX 12. The sole purpose of including this game in our benchmark today was to see how the GTX 1050Ti performs in DX12 mode.
Settings are at Ultra on full HD resolution.

DOOM

Finally we've introduced this much awaited titled to our benchmarks! Developed by ID Software Doom or popularly written as DOOM is a reboot of the older Doom series. Its fast and scary with more than enough variety of guns that you can ever imagine or even use!
Its OpenGL and quality is set to Ultra.

Noise and Temperature

The fans on the Gigabyte GTX 1050Ti Gaming G1 OC don't spin till the card hits 60°C or more. We recorded the maximum temperature in Celsius that our card hit during extensive gaming & sound was measured in decibels from a distance of 3 feet. This was performed for both stock and overclocked speeds.

My Verdict

The Gigabyte GTX 1050Ti Gaming G1 is the flagship offering from the brand and hence priced at $165 or Rs 15,000 in India. This puts the card right on the edge of the budget card segment but Gigabyte surely justified the pricing with the entire package that it rolls out with the GTX 1050 Ti. The shroud, custom build PCB, just the enough softwares, three HDMI ports and even the Windforce2X cooling solution are all incorporated very well in the product giving a premium finish to budget oriented product. I'm personally impressed by the performance & its stability at high clock speeds which are both higher than most of the competitors priced even higher to this! Sound all good right but there is one tiny problem its priced almost equivalent to the RX 570 which outperforms any GTX 1050Ti right out of the box at the cost of higher TDP and power consumption.
So the Gigabyte GTX 1050 Ti Gaming G1 OC is highly recommended if you are not on a strict budget, gaming for you mainly means eSport stuff, favor the green team, like some bling and want the best in the sub Rs 15,000 category giving you the perfect blend of aesthetics & performance.
I give it a 8/10 earning our Gold Award!

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Sunday 21 May 2017