Gigabyte GTX 1050 Ti G1 Gaming 4GB Video Card Review

In this review I looked at the Gigabyte GTX 1050 Ti G1 Gaming video card.  This is a flagship card in the GTX 1050 Ti lineup having the highest clocks and best cooler.  It is using a custom modified reference PCB and Windforce 2X cooling solution.  Long time readers of Hardware Asylum will know I tend to favor hot clocked and factory overclocked video cards over reference designs and this card comes with two overclock settings.  The factory overclock is 1366Mhz with a boost clock around 1480Mhz.  Using the Gigabyte software you can change this to OC mod which increases the core clock to 1392Mhz with a boost clock of 1506Mhz. 

Of course overclocking this card manually will always render more performance however, the factory overclock settings are not only stable but also supported under the factory warranty.

Overall the GTX 1050 Ti G1 Gaming performed extremely well and while slower than GTX 1060 it did prove to hold its own against an older Gigabyte GTX 670.  I normally wouldn’t even suggest a GTX 1050 series GPU to anyone, especially those who want to game however, when matched with an older system the 1050 Ti G1 Gaming can be a nice “economically sound” match for those looking to take advantage of DX12 and Windows 10.

Overclocking performance was a little disappointing in the grand scheme of things.  I say this because during my tests I discovered that the card really wanted to go faster however once the card hit the performance target it would immediately crash.  And by crash I mean it crashed HARD sometimes causing the driver to corrupt and requiring me to install a Maxwell based GPU to reset the configuration.  At least with some of the other Pascal cards I have used the crash was predictable and not so worrisome.

The other disappointment was the limit and performance gains of the overclock.  I spent several hours messing with the card trying to find a stable performance gain and while 150Mhz seems like a lot it translated into a 4FPS gain in Hitman and around 200 points in the Futuremark benches.  As I mentioned before Boost 3.0 really does what it can to extract the best performance and that is a good thing however this is a low-end card with limited performance.  That is the epitome of why we overclock and it is literally doing NOTHING. 

Again, this is a budget card with a factory overclock and for the majority of users that is enough.  Gamers who want/need more will move up to a GTX 1060 or GTX 1070 and those looking to fill a performance gap in a performance limited machine now have options.

Windforce 2X Heatsink
Included Backplate
RGB Lighting
Orange and Black
Factory Overclock
OC Profiles

Poor manual overclock performance