Modifying a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti for Passive Cooling

Three years ago, we published Passively Cooling Nvidia's GeForce GTX 750 Ti...With An AMD Sink. The result was, given the performance metrics of the time, a successful operation to turn first-gen Maxwell into a silent gamer by putting our trust in the company's ability to monitor temperature and scale frequency/voltage to obey a defined target.

But now GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti are available and we have a new challenge to face. After all, GTX 750 Ti was a 60W card, and the two 1050s are rated at 75W. We even went so far as to dig out our 2013 setup up with its modified cooler to compare the previous generation, plus GTX 650, in a passively-cooled shoot-out.

At a basic level, this is a battle of architectures: Kepler versus Maxwell versus Pascal. But it'll be interesting to see how each generation copes with the build's thermal limitations, and measure how far hardware improvements have come over the past three years.



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