This Mini $109 GTX 1050 Might Be Great For A HTPC / Living Room Steam Linux PC

Written by Michael Larabel in NVIDIA on 25 October 2016 at 09:51 AM EDT. 53 Comments
NVIDIA
The GeForce GTX 1050 graphics cards are beginning to ship today. As mentioned in yesterday's NVIDIA 375.10 vs. Linux 4.8 + Mesa 13.1-dev AMD GPU Benchmarks, I unfortunately don't have any Linux reviews to publish today due to waiting on the hardware but will have GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti reviews in the days ahead. The first GTX 1050 card to be tested is a Zotac GTX 1050 Mini, which might be great for a living room HTPC or 1080p "Steam Machine" on a budget.

The Zotac GeForce GTX 1050 Mini has 2GB of GDDR5 memory and a GTX 1050 GPU with 640 CUDA cores. It's a short card and like the other GTX 1050 models doesn't require any external PCI-E power connector. It isn't passively cooled, but as long as the fan isn't loud shouldn't be much of a problem for a HTPC / living room setup. The card shouldn't have issue fitting in a small form factor setup.


Like the other Pascal GPUs, the GTX 1050 supports VDPAU Feature Set H for support up to 8K HEVC/H.265 video streams. VDPAU and NVIDIA's proprietary driver make for a great multimedia experience.

NewEgg.com is the first Internet retailer where I've seen it in stock this morning, of any GTX 1050s, and this "mini" card is currently retailing for $109 USD, less still than the currently-priced Radeon RX 460 hardware. Amazon should also be getting their first GTX 1050 cards later today. At $109 USD this is the cheapest GTX 1050 I have seen thus far today in stock.

The Zotac GeForce GTX 1050 Mini Linux review should be published by Friday. It will be interesting to see where the GTX 1050 fits in compared to the latest NVIDIA vs. AMD GPU Linux benchmark results.

The GeForce GTX 1050 Ti I am testing this week is the EVGA GTX 1050 Ti SC, which isn't much larger than this Zotac GTX 1050 Mini while having the faster GPU, 4GB DDR5, and costs $149 USD.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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