Asus 1050Ti 4GB Expedition Edition Review - Affordable 1080P Gaming Power House!

When Nvdia unveiled their GTX 10 series line, it shook the world with its significant performance per dollar ratio and significant increase in performance from the previous generation. With our home rig itself equipped with the GTX 960 2GB model, we were curious whether it was a good idea to upgrade to the GTX 1050Ti 4GB model, let's see!

Pretty!

Asus 1050Ti 4GB Expedition Edition Specs

Bus Standard: PCI Express 3.0

OpenGL: OpenGL 4.5Video

Memory: 4GB GDDR5GPU boost

Clock: 1392 MHzGPU base

Clock: 1290 MHz

CUDA cores: 768

Memory Clock: 7008 MHz

Memory Interface: 128 bit

Digital MAX: Resolution: 7680 x 4320

DVI Output: 1x Native DVI-DHDMI

Output: 1x Native HDMI 2.0

HDCP compliant: YES

DisplayPort: 1x Native DisplayPort 1.4

NoSoftware Bundled: ASUS GPU Tweak II & Driver

Dimension: 212 x 111 x 38 mm

Price: PHP 8,850

Disclaimer: This unit was borrowed from Asus Philippines for our honest and unbiased review. This is not a sponsored post.

Build Quality / Design

The board!

Build quality wise, this is better than most of the other third party 1050Ti we've encountered. Each part that we could see and touch out of the box looks and feels solid and premium compared to the low-cost variants. The fans, the front fan shroud, the back plate, the ports and the circuit board all look a cut above against the more popular low cost counterparts.

Ports!

Side view

No power connector

What surprised us even more is that coming from the GTX 960 2GB, It is way smaller and there was a removal of the power connector. This means two things: The 1050Ti is more power efficient, and you can use this to upgrade almost any PCs that came out in the last 3 years. (Even prebuilt ones with enough space inside the case) 

Of course, we'll be testing the actual performance later to see if it is better in over all value.

Performance

Nice benchmark scores

We used the Unigine Valley benchmark tool for the 1050Ti 4 GB Expedition edition and the 960 2 GB. The results show that the 1050Ti 4 GB performed 10 percent better than the older 960 2 GB!

We tested the 1050Ti 4 GB expedition edition with the following games: Blizzard's Overwatch, Ubisoft's Rainbow Six: Siege and Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. Three of the most popular and three of the most demanding games today and in gameplay stats this is what we got.

For Overwatch, we prepared recorded footage that shows the in-game data and long story short, the 1050Ti 4 GB Expedition Edition ran Overwatch on 1080P Ultra with consistent 70+ frames per second with no noticeable framerate drop at any point. On our old GTX 960 we were only reach 50 to 60 FPS on 1080P Ultra which was fair to our older card.

For Rainbow Six Siege, we were playing at 1080P Ultra with standard textures at a smooth and consistent 60+ FPS as compared to the GTX 960 2 GB we were hitting 30 to 60 FPS with some noticeable frame rate drops. So for R6: Siege, there is quite an improvement. 

In terms of cooling, the shroud that holds the two fans looks sturdy and it never makes noise loud enough to penetrate the case and into the room where the CPU is in. 

In idle usage where the GPU isn't used too much the temperature is stable at 34 to 36 degrees Celsius while in maximum gaming load, the temperatures reach up to 62 degrees Celsius which is fair for most cards in this price range. In fact, we were surprised, we were expecting it to be at 70 degrees. 

The Strix counterpart maxes at 58 degrees Celsius primarily because of the dual heat pipes but makes it more expensive than the expedition. A difference of 4 degrees isn't too much if you consider that the Expedition was made to operate continuously for long hours of play.

Verdict

The GTX 1050Ti's performance is more or less 10% better than the older GTX 960 but without a power connector. This means that the 1050Ti is more efficient and is cheaper but if you are already a 960 user, there is no need to upgrade yet. But if you are coming from an older generation card or are using cards that perform lower than the 960, the 1050Ti is a great upgrade and we highly recommend it!

Build / Design - 4

Cooling - 4

Performance - 4.5

Average - 4.2 / 5