According to the latest Steam hardware survey, the most popular PC gaming resolution (by far) is 1,920 x 1,080, accounting for 37.47 per cent of Steam users, while 2,560 x 1,440 is on just 1.81 per cent.
Loads of PC gamers clearly have no intention of moving beyond 1080p at the moment, and Nvidia’s latest GeForce GTX 1050 Ti is aimed squarely at this 1080p gaming club.
With cards costing just £139 inc VAT, the GTX 1050 Ti is also significantly cheaper than its GTX 1060- based brethren. It uses Nvidia’s slimmed down 16nm GP107 Pascal GPU, which has just six streaming multiprocessors, giving you 768 stream processors, compared to the 1,152 stream processors found in 3GB GTX 1060 cards.
Unlike the GTX 1060, it also has a slimmer 128-bit memory interface, although this also means it can easily be equipped with 4GB of memory. At stock speed, the GTX 1050 Ti’s 4GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 3504MHz (7008MHz effective), compared to the 8GHz (effective) GTX 1060 3GB memory speed. Meanwhile, the GPU core is clocked at 1290MHz, again a fair bit lower than the GTX 1060 3GB’s 1506MHz base clock, with a boost frequency of 1392MHz. As with the GTX 1060, there’s no SLI support either, so you can only use the GTX 1050 Ti in single card configurations.
One key bonus of the GTX 1050 Ti, however, is its very low power consumption. Stock cards don’t need any additional PCI-E power connectors, drawing all their power from the slot. Not every card comes without extra power connectors though. For our review, Asus sent us its GTX 1050 Ti Strix OC card (pictured), which features a 6-pin PCI-E connector.
This story is from the February 2017 edition of Custom PC.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the February 2017 edition of Custom PC.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Netgear Orbi Whole Home Wi-Fi System
Most high-end routers take a brute-force approach to improving Wi-Fi speed and range, adding more antennae, more frequency bands and the latest Wi-Fi standards. That approach works up to a point, but eventually even powerful routers run out or range. Of course, you can buy Wi-Fi extenders, extra Ethernet cable and access points, or use powerline networking, but Netgear has taken a novel approach with the Orbi that pretty much solves the problem.
The 4K Multi-GPU Challenge
Ben Hardwidge pairs up two Zotac GTX 1070 cards to see if they can properly handle 4K gaming.
Game Maker Studio2
Rick Lane speaks toYoYo Games about the all-new version of Game Maker.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition
If you spent over a grand on a Titan X card a few months ago then you might want to flip through the next couple of pages and pretend you haven’t seen them.
Cobra
Rick Lane speaks to David Braben about the changes to Frontier’s tech since the launch of Elite Dangerous.
Ryzen Is A Strong Comeback For AMD
But the CPU isn’t a critical component any more, argues James Gorbold.
Customised PC
Case mods, tools, techniques, water-cooling gear and every thing to do with PC modding.
Games Of 2017
Rick Lane forecasts the next 12months’ big hitters
Vive & Learn
Joe martin describes the pains and pleasures of using the htc vive’s room-scale virtual reality system at home
Readers' Drives Spec-Edge
Inspired by Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, Johan Nyman gave his components a splash of red and white paint, and assembled this gorgeous themed build
