Today Nvidia has officially announced a more affordable line of gaming CPUs that use their latest Pascal architecture, namely the new GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti series. These new GPUs are designed to offer a good performance for entry level gaming at 1080p with decent enough framerates, but without the user required to upgrade power supply or think about improving the cooling of their computers. You can think of the new Pascal GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti as the successors of the entry level Maxwell-based GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti that Nvidia has introduced a couple of years ago. Of course the new GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti do come with similar price range and power usage, but they should be able to offer a better performance to users, regardless if it is for gaming or for crypto currency mining...
Below are the official specifications of the new GPUs. The recommended prices are set at $109 USD for the GTX 1050 and $139 USD for the GTX 1050 Ti, though we are probably going to see more expensive models with some extra features available. The availability of the new GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti GPUs is set for October 25th, meaning that you will need to have one more week before they are actually on the market and available for purchase. I'm personally interested in the crypto mining performance they are going to be able to deliver in various algorithms used by different crypto coins, so I'll try to do some testing as soon as I'm able to get my hands on one of these new boards... most likely the Ti version as it is not much more expensive and should provide a bit of extra performance when compared to the regular GTX 1050.
GeForce GTX 1050 TI Specifications:
Graphics Processing Clusters: 2
Streaming Multiprocessors: 6
CUDA Cores (single precision): 768
Texture Units: 48
ROP Units: 32
Base Clock: 1290 MHz
Boost Clock: 1392 MHz
Memory Clock: 3504 MHz
Memory Data Rate: 7 Gbps
L2 Cache Size: 1024K
Total Video Memory: 4096 MB GDDR5
Memory Interface: 128-bit
Total Memory Bandwidth: 112 GB/s
Texture Rate (Bilinear): 61.9 GigaTexels/sec
Fabrication Process: 14 nm
Transistor Count: 3.3 Billion
Connectors: 1 x DisplayPort, 1 x HDMI, 1 x Dual-Link DVI
Form Factor: Dual Slot
Power Connectors: None
Recommended Power Supply: 300 Watts
Thermal Design Power (TDP): 75 Watts
Thermal Threshold: 97° C
GeForce GTX 1050 Specifications
Graphics Processing Clusters: 2
Streaming Multiprocessors: 5
CUDA Cores (single precision): 640
Texture Units: 40
ROP Units: 32
Base Clock: 1354 MHz
Boost Clock: 1455 MHz
Memory Clock: 3504 MHz
Memory Data Rate: 7 Gbps
L2 Cache Size: 1024K
Total Video Memory: 2048 MB GDDR5
Memory Interface: 128-bit
Total Memory Bandwidth: 112 GB/s
Texture Rate (Bilinear): 54.2 GigaTexels/sec
Fabrication Process: 14 nm
Transistor Count: 3.3 Billion
Connectors: 1 x DisplayPort, 1 x HDMI, 1 x Dual-Link DVI
Form Factor: Dual Slot
Power Connectors: None
Recommended Power Supply: 300 Watts
Thermal Design Power (TDP): 75 Watts
Thermal Threshold: 97° C
Unlike the higher-end Pascal-based GPUs from Nvidia the GTX 1050 and the GTX 1050 Ti will not come with an "official" reference design or the so called Founders Edition model. The new GPUs will be offered in non-reference versions from Nvidia partners such as ASUS, EVGA, Galaxy, 1Game, Gigabyte, Inno3D, MSI, Palit, Zotac in single and dual-fan designs and most likely with slightly different default operating frequencies. Do note that the specifications say that both GPUs will have up to 75W TDP and thus will not feature PCI-E power connector for additional power delivery. I'm pretty sure however that partners like ASUS and Gigabyte and probably others will be offering factory overclocked versions of the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti that will come with a PCI-E power connector.
With the release of the latest GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti the segmentation of the gaming GPUs offered by Nvidia looks like that. The highest performing and a bit too expensive GTX 1080 is on the top, the GTX 1070 and GTX 1060 are the mid-range with the 1070 probably being the best choice for gaming (and probably mining as well) in terms of price/performance ratio and then the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti as entry level gaming GPUs. I'm pretty sure that if Nvidia releases more lower-end Pascal-based GPUs at some later time they will not be carrying the GTX marking and thus will not be targeted at gamers. The line does not include the GTX Titan based on the new Pascal GPU as it is rally a niche product offering even higher performance that the 1080, but at an even higher price point and not that easy to get (only reference design) and being offered directly by Nvidia only.
Here is the official promotional video from Nvidia about the new GTX 1050 series of GPUs if you are interested, though it does not contain much useful information actually... it is a promotional video. The first reviews and benchmarks of various video cards based on the GTX 1050 series of GPUs from Nvidia should start popping up after October 25th, so one more week to wait in order to see some actual performance results for gaming as well as for crypto mining by those that might be interested in using them for that as well. It is also interesting to see how they will be competing against the new lower-end Radeon RX series GPUs that are in the same or similar price range such as the RX 460 for example....
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