Best GTX 1050 Overclocking Settings Guide
Looking to get more performance out of the GTX 1050? This guide walks through the exact overclocking steps, settings, and benchmarks that show how much extra power this card can deliver. The GTX 1050 is one of the best budget options for 1080p gaming, and with the right tuning it can push well beyond its stock performance:
In this video I’m going to quickly go through the basics of overclocking and benchmarking the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card.
The GTX 1050 is a mid range card first released in late 2016. Essentially a scaled down version of the fully unlocked GTX 1050 Ti card, the GTX 1050 includes the same GPU with 128 CUDA cores disabled as well as half the memory. This tends to put the GTX 1050 at a beautiful price point for the performance. It’s one of the cheapest and easiest ways to get full 1080p performance out of just about any off the shelf desktop machine you may come across.
The low cost, low power requirements, and small size of the 1050 make it a great bang for your buck option in many situations. The ability to overclock the card to provide a small but significant boost to overall performance makes this card all the more exciting.
So let’s see what we’re dealing with. The GTX 1050 is based on the GP107 graphics processor and has 640 CUDA cores running at 1354 MHz core clock and 1752 MHz memory clock. This card comes in both full size and low profile versions supporting either single or dual cooling fans. The GTX 1050 comes with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory.
The example cards we have here are the Zotac GTX 1050 Mini as well as the Gigabyte GTX 1050 Overclock Edition. For these tests we’re going with the Gigabyte card, however the steps will be the same no matter what version of the 1050 you have.
Let’s get ready to overclock and benchmark this card and see what kind of performance we can get. The first thing we’re going to want to do is update the drivers. Let’s pop over to Nvidia real quick and grab the latest ones.
Now that our drivers are nice and updated, the next step is to install an overclocking program called MSI Afterburner. MSI Afterburner is a totally free tool that gives you a high level of control and monitoring over your graphics card. It’s made by the company MSI, but in no way do you need to use it with an MSI brand of card or anything like that.
Now that MSI Afterburner is installed, let’s go through the key settings we’ll be using. We’ll be focusing on voltage, clock speed, and fan settings. We can see that the fan speed is currently set to Auto. You can turn this off and manually select the fan speed, but in this video we’re just going to leave it on Auto.
We can set our core clock and memory clock values from the middle section here. For voltage, you can see that the setting is grayed out by default. If you’d like to change the voltage, you’ll first need to go into Properties and then check the box labeled “Unlock Voltage Control”. I’d recommend being very careful when changing the voltage and only doing it in small increments.
You can reset your settings back to default by clicking on the reverse arrow at the bottom. Once you’re satisfied with your changes, you can click the check button to apply them. You can save your current settings to a profile by clicking the Save button and then clicking on one of the profiles along the right hand side. Finally, you can have the current settings automatically apply at Windows startup by clicking the Windows icon in the upper right corner.
Now I’m going to put a list of known successful GTX 1050 overclocks on the screen as well as in the description. Every card is different, but this should give you a good starting point for potential overclock values that may work for you.
Now that we’ve locked in potential overclock settings, we’re going to want to test them. We’re going to run through five different programs that have benchmarks to test our overclock for stability and performance. All the programs we’re testing with are free.
What I’ll do is run through all five benchmarks using stock settings to obtain base level performance numbers. Then I’ll select a moderate initial increase in both core clock and memory clock settings. I’ll then run through the Unigine benchmark tool over and over while increasing the overclock values slightly each time.
Once the settings have been pushed too far and I start seeing crashing, graphical glitches, or any type of odd behavior, I’ll dial back the settings to where they were just previously when everything was still running smoothly. At that point I now have a solid idea of where the sweet spot is for overclocking my particular card. I can either stick with those settings or try tweaking things just a bit further.
After about a dozen tests or so, this particular card was able to achieve a solid overclock of +220 core clock and +440 memory clock. I did need to tweak the voltage up slightly by 15 percent in order to keep the card stable at anything higher than +200 core and +400 memory.
So let’s run through each of the five benchmarks to see how the GTX 1050 performed. First up is 3DMark Demo, the popular benchmarking standard released in 2013. Running at default settings, the original test came in with a graphics score of 1890. After overclocking, graphics score improved to 2087. That’s an increase of 10.4 percent, so it’s looking good so far.
Next up we’ve got Unigine Superposition benchmark tool. Running at the 1080p Medium preset, initial results achieved a score of 47.97. After overclocking, the score improved to 52.87. This is an increase of 10.2 percent, so a solid improvement here as well.
Third on the list is Shadow of the Tomb Raider Trial benchmark tool. Running at 1080p and the Low settings preset, our initial frames rendered was 6101 with an average FPS of 39. After overclock, frames rendered increased to 6521 with an average FPS of 42. That’s a frames rendered increase of 6.9 percent. Not bad, but the relatively weak Athlon 200GE CPU being used in this test machine may have been somewhat of a limiting factor in this test.
Benchmark number four is Spaceship Visual Effect Graph Demo. Running at 1080p on the Low quality preset, the initial test achieved an overall average FPS of 68.6. After overclocking, overall FPS increased to 73.6. That’s an increase of 7.3 percent. Not a crazy improvement, but not bad.
For our fifth test we have Final Fantasy 14 Endwalker Benchmark Tool. At 1080p on the Standard preset, the GTX 1050 achieved a base score of 10496 with a rating of High. After overclocking, the card was able to achieve a score of 11116 with a rating of Very High. That’s an increase of 5.9 percent. Not quite as much as I had hoped, but I’ll take it.
So there you have it. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050. Overall I’d have to say I’m very satisfied with the results this card can deliver.
Let us hear your thoughts or experiences with the GTX 1050 down in the video comments and thanks for watching!
MSI Afterburner download page:
