ZOTAC GTX 1050 Mini Review

Equipped to take on the low-end of the graphics card market, the compact ZOTAC GTX 1050 MINI is ready for 1080p gamers using SFF.

Product on Review: GTX 1050 MINI
Manufacturer & Sponsor: ZOTAC
Street Price: £119.99 GBP / $115 USD

The latter end of this year has been full of excitement in the graphics card division. NVIDIA’s GTX 10 series has been one of their most notable generation releases yet, with the GTX 1060, 1070 and 1080 asserting dominance over the mid and high range but what about the entry-level? So far, AMD has seized the opportunity and taken advantage with the RX 460 but today NVIDIA has the answer for the low-end by way of the NVIDIA GTX 1050.

Today we’ll be looking to ZOTAC for a detailed review of the GTX 1050 MINI. As its name suggests, this graphics card bears a super-small footprint at just 145mm in length. Not only is this GTX 1050 ideal for small form factor systems but it also obtains power to operate from the PCI express slot – so no need for a PCI-E cable from the PSU.

The intention of the GTX 1050 is to tackle 1080p, but will this card be able to take the spotlight from the AMD RX 460? Let’s find out!

About ZOTAC

Everyone deserves great gaming. That’s why we created the fast, powerful ZOTAC GeForce® GTX 1050 Mini. 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 in super compact form.

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications surrounding GTX 1050 Mini, supplied directly from ZOTAC:

GPU
GeForce® GTX 1050
CUDA cores
640
Video Memory
2GB GDDR5
Memory Bus
128-bit
Engine Clock
Base: 1354 MHz
Boost:1455 MHz
Memory Clock
7 GHz
PCI Express
3.0
Display Outputs
DisplayPort 1.4
HDMI 2.0b
DL-DVI
Multi Display Capability
Triple Display
Recommended Power Supply
300W
Power Consumption
75W
DirectX
12 API feature level 12_1
OpenGL
4.5
Cooling
Single Fan
Slot Size
Dual Slot
Supported OS
Windows 10 / 8 / 7
Card Length
144.78mm x 111.15mm
Accessories
User Manual

Detailed Look & Video Review

For this review, we’ve produced a video review over on our YouTube channel which details all of the included features, and takes a close look at the PCB/cooling solution along with the addition of some gaming benchmarks. Please check out our video review or hit play on the video below:

Test Setup & Methodology

How we test graphics cards

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

Hardware

Taking Intel’s High-End Desktop platform, our hardware utilises the Intel X99 chipset. Combined with this we use the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic and achievable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of DDR4 at 2666MHz and a 750GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

High End Graphics Cards on test:
ZOTAC GTX 1050 MINI (NVIDIA 375.57)
XFX RX 460 DD Edition (Crimson 16.9.2)

Special thanks go to Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:

Motherboard: MSI X99S GAMING 9 AC
CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition @ 4GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair LPX Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 2666MHz 16-17-17-35 C1
Power Supply – CORSAIR HX1050
Hard Drive – Samsung 840 EVO 750GB
Cooler – CORSAIR Hydro Series™ H105 240mm Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Monitor – AOC 28″ 4K U2879VF
Capture Card – Razer Ripjaw

Benchmarks
If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we’ve chosen:

DOOM (OpenGL 4.5 & Vulkan)
Total War: Warhammer
Rise of the Tomb Raider
HITMAN
DiRT Rally

To capture framerates we use a combination of in-game benchmark tools, FRAPS and PresentMon.

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included three of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

Unigine: Valley
Unigine: Heaven 4
Futuremark 3DMark Firestrike
Futuremark 3DMark Time Spy

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Power, Temperatures, Acoustics

To test for power consumption, we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Heaven 4.0 which was ran for 20 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.

Temperature

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests we set Heaven 4.0 running continuously for ~30 minutes recorded the peak/maximum GPU temperature.

Acoustics

ZOTAC’s GTX 1050 MINI uses a single 80mm cooling fan and this is an extremely quiet solution. Click here to listen!

Overclocking

To overclock the GTX 1050 MINI we used the MSI Afterburner Tool since it gives extensive options for modifying the GPU and memory clock.

Overclocking the card was easy and we managed to boost the GPU and memory clock to a significant point. Our result took the GPU clock up to 1604MHz (1705MHz Boost) and modifying the memory clock up to 1705MHz. Pushing the card a little further meant we were able to receive a higher score in Unigine Heaven 4.0 which is shown below.

Applying such an overclock will be advantageous to 3D performance.

DX12: 3DMark Time Spy

With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, 3DMark Time Spy is the ideal benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards.

DX11: 3DMark FireStrike

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is Futuremark’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

DX11: Unigine Heaven 4.0

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

DX11: Unigine Valley

Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.

DX12: DOOM OpenGL 4.5

By default DOOM utilises an OpenGL 4.5 renderer, and is one of relatively few Windows PC titles to not use DirectX 12. It tests how well NVIDIA and AMD’s GPUs deal with a less mainstream approach, especially in regards to driver optimisations, and like all of id titles stretches graphics quality to the limit.

DX12: DOOM Vulkan

id have also released an optional Vulkan rendering path for DOOM. This API is a development of AMD’s Mantle low level which has been taken on board by the Kronos Group for implementation as the next generation of Open graphics APIs. Like DirectX 12 Vulkan is capable of Asynchronous Compute in specific configurations.

DX12: Total War: WARHAMMER

Total War: WARHAMMER is a pseudo Real-Time Strategy title which leverages DirectX 12 to render huge numbers of complex units on screen at any one time.

DX12: Rise of the Tomb Raider

Square Enix’s Rise of the Tomb Raider is the sequel to 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot. An enormously challenging title graphically, the developers also released an optional DirectX 12 render path for Windows 10 users. Although it has undergone a number of iterations this rendering pathway notably doesn’t currently utilise the full capabilities of DirectX 12.

DX12: HITMAN

Yet another DirectX 12 title, 2016’s Hitman from Square Enix and developer IO Interactive has a more robust DirectX 12 implementation than Rise of the Tomb Raider. We’ve tested at a full range of resultions, from 1080p through to 4K, which provides a look at the impact of GPU speed and memory utilisation.

DX11: DiRT Rally

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Value For Money

We make a simple calculation for this set of results. For each game we add all of the resulting FPS totals together and then divide by the four sets to give us an overall performance figure. While the figures alone do not give you an accurate picture of how the card will perform in any given scenario, they do tell you, when averaged, which GPU is the more capable across all of the benchmarks and settings tested.

Conclusion

NVIDIA’s GTX 10 Series has made a substantial impact to both the desktop and mobile graphics sector. In the desktop department, NVIDIA has covered the mid-to-high end with the GTX 1060, 1070 and 1080 and the low-end has therefore been quite exposed, allowing AMD to monopolize with their RX 460. That is, until now.

The release of the GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti is the green team’s response to the RX 460 and therefore the remaining GTX 10 Series card to fill the entry-level spot. Today’s review of the ZOTAC GTX 1050 MINI is a showcase of how capable the GP107 really is. While our graphics card features no factory overclock, it’s still able to deliver great performance for those using 1080p as the chosen resolution for gaming. What’s especially encouraging is that we were able to modify the GPU and memory clock speeds to an admirable point and applying such a manual overclock presents a significant advantage.

The minuscule footprint of GTX 1050 MINI is something of a triumph because such dimensions allow system builders to squeeze this card into the smallest of computer cases and is likely to be the ideal solution for mini-ITX systems. The other obvious benefit is the omission of a PCI Express connector – rendering ZOTAC’s graphics card even more flexible because the power supply can be taken out of the equation altogether.

Overall, our GTX 1050 MINI performs well in DX11 and DX12 titles – 1080p with medium/high detail is the sweetspot with this card. Not only is the 3D performance pleasing, but the performance from the single fan cooling solution is also a positive aspect of this card too – users can expect low-noise and low-temperatures.

GTX 1050 MINI arrives with the price-tag of £119.99 GBP / $115 USD. At this price point the RX 460 is slightly cheaper but is also neck and neck with the GTX 1050 in some cases, but there are some obvious benefits by going with ZOTAC’s option here – performance and size are the prominent advantages and the backing of a 5-year warranty will certainly seal the deal.

ZOTAC’s new GTX 1050 MINI is a superb little card which is ideal for mini-ITX system builders who are looking for a good value for money graphics card capable of handling 1080p.

VIDEO REVIEW – VORTEZ TV

Pros
+ Clean look
+ Super compact
+ Powered by PCI Express slot
+ Low power consumption
+ Manually overclocks very well
+ Quiet & effective cooling
+ Great 1080p performance
+ DirectX 12 ready
+ 5-year warranty

Cons
– No backplate
– No factory overclock

Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.