The long-awaited 75W Pascal cards are almost here, with today’s announcement of the NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1050. These new cards fill out the previously missing entry-level of NVIDIA’s Pascal-series product stack. AnandTech has a great overview of the new cards but unfortunately there are no actual reviews yet. The retail release date is next week on the 25th, so presumably we’ll see actual performance figures sometime close to that date.
We’ll have to wait for the reviews for the full performance rundown, but leaked benchmarks show the GTX 1050 Ti slightly outperforming the GTX 960 in 3DMark. Most importantly for SFF enthusiasts though, is that it does so within a 75W power envelope, allowing the launch cards to skip the 6-pin power connector for the non-overclocked models. While the preceeding GTX 950 has slot-powered cards also, they came late in the product cycle so I’m glad to see the 1050-series will have 75W versions right from the start.
While NVIDIA won’t be releasing a reference/Founder’s design for the 1050-series, many of the launch cards look to be of the short, ITX form factor. As usual, no word on any half-height/low profile variants, but hopefully we’ll see some this generation.
Price for the GTX 1050 Ti is $139 and $109 for the 1050, making these new cards very price competitive with the comparable Radeon 400-series cards. And as mentioned earlier the release date is October 25th, but according to AnandTech’s understanding of what NVIDIA has said, only the 1050 Ti will be available immediately with the 1050 to follow within a few weeks.
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