Colorful iGame GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Graphics Card Review

Colorful iGame While Colorful may not have the big name reputation here in Europe or even in the US, they're still a big player in the dGPU market. With a significant presence in Eastern markets, they deliver some very competitive graphics cards, and even more competitive prices. For gamers on a tighter budget, the GTX 1080 Ti likely isn't on your shopping list. However, at under £150, the GTX 1050 Ti is a competitive solution for affordable PC gaming. The 1050 Ti has proven a big hit with many PC gamers who play at 1080p (or lower), in the eSports market, and for games like LoL, Fortnite, PUBG, Minecraft, etc. Features Chipset GPU NVIDIA GeForce: GTX1050Ti Manufacturing Process: 14 nm CUDA Cores: 768 Default/Boost Clock 1290/1392MHz Turbo/Boost Clock 1379/1493MHz Memory Clock 7000MHZ Memory Config 4GB GDDR5 / 128 Bit Type 2x Fan (9cm) Heatpipe size & Q'ty 2xφ6 (Al) Fan Power Connector 4-pin, PWM Specifications For in-depth specifications, please visit the product page here. What Colorful Had to Say "Everyone deserves great gaming. That s why we created the fast, powerful GeForce GTX 1050. Now, you can turn your PC into a true gaming rig, powered by NVIDIA Pascal the most advanced GPU architecture ever created. It's loaded with innovative NVIDIA Game Ready technologies that let every gamer experience the latest titles in their full glory. GameReady." - Colorful What's in the Box Obviously, the graphics card is in the box. However, you'll also find a nice colour manual, driver CD that you should never use (download your drivers!), and a handy Molex to 6-pin for those lacking the required connectors. Right, that's the basics, so let's take a closer look! A Closer Look For a budget or at least an affordable GPU, the iGame looks pretty sharp and stylish. The cooler design is cool, and the matte black and vibrant red pop out. Sure, black and red have been done to death for PC gaming hardware, but it works really well and is easily colour matched with many other brands hardware too. Aesthetically pleasing as it may be, it's pretty competent as a cooler design too. Two large fans are going to drive plenty of airflow over the interior heat fin array. Furthermore, the heat fins are finished in black, which looks pretty neat and tidy too. Of course, you can see there's a dual heat pipe design also, and generally, this looks like significantly more cooling that is even needed by this chipset, so it should run great! Display outputs are well catered for, with DP, HDMI, and DVI all on offer, giving you great flexibility. There's loads of ventilation here too, and that can only help boost the cooling performance even further. One neat little trick is hiding back here, with this lovely mechanical switch. Hit the switch, and you'll enable the cards boost mode. This is a pre-overclocked profile that can be turned on at any time, giving the cards GPU clock a boost from 1392 MHz up to 1493 MHz, which is pretty cool. If your card is running cool, hit the switch for more performance, although if you're in a hotter environment, or have limited system airflow, perhaps not. As if the cooling potential of this little card wasn't already looking impressive enough, you'll also find a full-size rear backplate. Finished in the same black and red, it looks stunning. Again, for a cheaper card, the build quality here is properly impressive. So there you have it, the iGame 1050 Ti from Colorful. Now, let's get it on our test bench and see what it can do! How We Test Testing Procedure Here at eTeknix, we endeavour to disclose vital information regarding the benchmarking process so that readers can quantify the results and attempt to replicate them using their hardware. When it comes to our benchmarks in our reviews, the benchmarks are pretty self-explanatory although there are a few exceptions. Remember that your choice of graphics card, CPU, the silicon lottery, and other factors can yield different numbers, and there's always a margin for error when using any software. Therefore, your experience may vary. Testing Your Own System Links are provided below, as well as the settings we use. We encourage you to not just look at how one product compares to any other, but how it compares to your own. If you're looking to build a new system, you should benchmark your current PC using our benchmarks and settings where possible. You should then look at the percentage improvement from your current hardware to the hardware we tested to give you a ballpark figure of how much an upgrade this will provide you with. Graphics Card Test System Motherboard – Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 7 Z370 Processor – Intel Core i7-8700K @ 5.0 GHz RAM – Crucial Ballistix Gaming 32GB (4 x 8GB) 3000 MHz CPU Cooler – Noctua NH-D15S Power Supply – Be Quiet Power Zone 1000W Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Open Air Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 64-bit Additional Hardware Killawatt style electricity usage meter wall plug Precision Gold N05CC Decibel meter Gaming Any technology which favours either AMD or NVIDIA is disabled where possible. More specifically, this refers to PhysX, Hairworks and similar technologies. Additionally, we also disable all forms of AA, including FXAA, to gauge performance levels which aren't impacted by sophisticated AA wherever possible. V-Sync is always disabled in our testing, as is FreeSync and G-Sync technologies or similar. Graphics card power usage set to optimised or balance, and the system power mode set to High Performance within Windows and the available GPU driver software. Identical settings are used for all resolutions unless otherwise stated. Games and Settings Used Rise of the Tomb Raider (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Pure Hair Off Deus Ex (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Ghost Recon: Wildlands (Uplay) Medium Preset Turf Effects Off Far Cry Primal (Uplay) Normal Preset Software Used 3DMark Fire Strike (download) FireStrike (1080p) Benchmark Unigine Superposition (download) 1080p Extreme Benchmark HWMonitor (download) Noise Everyone has a reasonable noise level preference when it comes to comes to components on a computer. Some can handle all fans at 100% load to keep temperatures down; some want an entirely silent computer. To accurately gauge the noise output of a graphics card, we position a Precision Gold N05CC one meter above our open-air test bench and take an average reading at idle and load. Noise levels in your own system or an enclosed system will likely be lower than this. Power Consumption We take power readings during idle state with no background applications running. Then again at 50% completion of the Unigine Superposition benchmark, using the average as the final published result. Temperatures We take temperature readings after 10 minutes of desktop idle with no background programs running, then take the recorded maximum delivered from Unigine Superposition after a 4K optimised run, confirming the numbers are accurate with HWMonitor. Furthermore, the ambient temperature is always kept +/- 1c from 21c. 3DMark & Unigine FireStrike OK so straight off the bat, it's obvious this GPU isn't going to top any of our performance charts. However, going up against other affordable GPUs such as the GTX 1050 and the RX 560, it's obvious that the Ti edition has a performance edge. It pulls ahead of the non-Ti edition by a fair amount in 3DMark and holds onto that lead with confidence in Extreme and Ultra too. It's a fair bit behind the RX 570, but at almost half the price, that's to be expected. FireStrike Extreme FireStrike Ultra Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme Another demanding benchmark shows very similar results. The 1080p performance is fantastic here, and well ahead of other affordable rivals. Of course, the 4K performance was awful, but again it's a good stress test, and the card held up well for its price range, it even narrowed the gap against the RX570. Unigine Superposition 4K Optimised DirectX12 Gaming Benchmarks Deus Ex: Mankind Divided So it's obvious this is more a 1080p gaming card than it is a 4K gaming card. In both Deus Ex and Tomb Raider, it was pretty much unplayable at 4K. However, at 1080p, it did a fantastic job in both. Deus Ex is a hard game to run well, but with a few tweaks, you could certainly get that above 60 FPS. 1080p 2160p Rise of the Tomb Raider Rise of the Tomb Raider faired very well, hitting 68 FPS, which is nicely above that golden 60 FPS rule and very much playable smoothly. 1080p 2160p DirectX11 Gaming Benchmarks Far Cry Primal Another great score here for Far Cry Primal too, hitting 63 FPS and again, that's perfectly smooth gaming for any game. 1080p 2160p Ghost Recon: Wildlands What really surprised is how well Ghost Recon performed. 51 FPS is a bit below that ideal 60 FPS window, but for such a cheap GPU on such a demanding title, it's really good. Again, tweak a few settings down a touch, and you'll smooth that out with a minimal visual loss. 1080p 2160p Overclocking, Noise, Heat and Power Overclocking was pretty simple on this card, with a high factory overclock available by hitting the Boost button. The card would clock higher manually, but didn't seem to be stable, and it seems iGame did a good job right out of the box. 3DMark boosted from 7285 to 7805, an improvement of around 7.2%, which is about the same ratio that the core clock was also increased. 3DMark Firestrike Acoustic Performance At stock, the card was really quite, clocking just 44 dBa and this increased to 46 dBa once overclocked. In all honesty, it was pretty quiet in both tests given the smaller cooler design. Thermal Performance The cooler design, heatpipes, good fans and the backplate work very well, with the card reading just 54c under full load in Unigine. While overclocking took that to 61c, that's still pretty darn cool for this chipset, and I'm very happy with the results overall. Power Consumption Amazingly, the card uses less power than the GTX 1050 we tested, hitting just 114 watts under full load while overclocked. That's barely any power at all for gaming, and again, extremely impressive. Final Thoughts How Much Does it Cost? The Colorful iGame 1050 Ti Gaming Graphics Card is available from GearBest for just £142.49 at the time of writing. That's a 38% discount on a flash sale which is available for another two weeks. I'm not sure it'll go back to the full price after the sale, so please check the product page here for up to date pricing information. If you can get one for closer to £150 give or take 10% either way, you're getting an amazing deal. Overview I haven't had the pleasure of doing much work with Colorful hardware over the years, but every time I have used it professionally or otherwise, it's always impressed. It's not the most flash GPU in the world, and it's far from the most powerful, or the most expensive. However, it's none the less an impressive bit of hardware at an incredibly promising price. Build Quality This is the most impressive aspect of this card, as you can do a lot worse for the same money. The inclusion of a full-size backplate on an affordable GPU is a welcome treat and really makes the card look great, and can improve PCB cooling too. The dual heat pipe design feeding into a blacked out heatsink, and with two lovely fans providing plenty of airflow; it all adds up to a more premium looking and performing product. Performance A Titan slayer this is not, but for those that are gaming at 1080p, it'll play the latest games at decent graphics quality settings. For games like Fortnite, Minecraft, LoL, and other eSport friendly titles, it'll be more than enough for your needs. This makes it both appealing to those with tighter budgets for a GPU upgrade, or for those building their first rig, or a rig for a younger PC gamer to cut their teeth on. Should I Buy One? Honestly, I think this is a real bargain here. The performance is far better than you would have expected in this price range. Furthermore, just a few years ago, this level of performance and build quality was beyond unthinkable at this price range. If you're looking for a great GPU at a great price, the Colorful iGame 1050 Ti is it!