Palit GeForce GTX 1050 Ti KalmX vs 1050 Ti StormX – “passive” vs “active” GPU (benchmarks and comparison)

In the realm of GPUs there is a constant strife for achieving balance between performance and noise. With the Pascal generation, NVIDIA managed to achieve really good hardware optimization and deliver good performance out of a 75 W graphics card. Yes, we are talking about the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. It is a good prerequisite for us to see various iterations by manufacturers. Palit even made a passively cooled model (cooling without own airflow generation – without a fan, in other words). The model’s name is Palit GeForce GTX 1050 Ti KalmX and we would like to compare it to the other GTX 1050 Ti model by Palit – StormX.

These graphics cards have similar specifications – 1290 MHz base core clock and 1392 MHz boos core clock of the 768 CUDA cores. They also have 4GB GDDR5 memory with 128-bit bus. As for the memory bandwidth – it is 112 GB/sec. Additionally, each of the two GPUs has one Dual-Link DVI port, an HDMI output and one Display Port. They also support all technologies characteristic of Pascal chips.

And now it is time to mention where the two products differ. Actually, their only difference is as regards their cooling systems. The one of Palit GeForce GTX 1050 Ti StormX consists of an aluminum block with a fan on top (similar to Intel’s stock cooler). On the other hand, KalmX cooling system consists of a massive block with aluminum ribs connected to the graphics processor with the help of two copper heat pipes for the purpose of as efficient heat transfer (from the chip to the cooler) as possible.

You may wish to know that we used Unigine Heaven 3 and 4 as well as 3DMark Fire Strike to see whether we shall register the so called Thermal Throttling that has a negative impact on a GPU’s performance.

ModelRadeon RX 460GTX 1050 Gaming XGTX 1050 Ti KalmXGTX 1050 Ti StormXGTX 1060 STRIX
Unigine Heaven 3 1 946 (-20.3%)2 289 (-6.2%)2 4392 462 (+0.9%)4 062 (+65%)
Unigine Heaven 41 419 (-24.2%)1 747 (-6.6%)1 8711 8723 107 (+66.1%)
3DMark Fire Strike5 429(-26.1%)7 118 (-3.1%)7 3477 443 (+1.3%)13 070 (+77.9%)

We can see that despite the lack of a fan in the cooling system, the Palit GeForce GTX 1050 Ti KalmX performs adequately. Also, the differences are negligible – within the 1% margin in favor of the actively cooled GPU. This kind of difference is surely unnoticeable in everyday use.

You can find our detailed Palit GeForce GTX 1050 Ti KalmX review HERE.

You could also browse through all currently available NVIDIA GPUs here: http://amzn.to/2nNK85c

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Roland
Roland
6 years ago

great review, had a difficulty to find any performance data on the passive version of the GTX1050, now I have and will certainly go for the KalmX