Crazed modder discovers RTX 5050 is actually faster than a 1080 Ti — ends up overclocking Nvidia's plucky budget card to 3300MHz, swipes top six scores in 3DMark Time Spy with 28% clock speed increase
Old flagship beaten by new turnip – four generations later, Nvidia’s Pascal GeForce GTX flagship has fallen to the lowly RTX 5050
Graphics card enthusiast TrashBench has created a video pitching the venerable flagship of the Pascal era against the ‘turnip’ of the Blackwell era, with unexpected results. The ‘Voltage first. Questions later.’ Aussie explains that he set out to “overclock a GTX 1080 Ti hard enough to embarrass Nvidia’s new RTX 5050.” However, things didn’t turn out as planned, with the 5050 grasping an unexpected triumph both at stock and with its impressive overclockability.
TrashBench’s plans regarding the GTX 1080 Ti didn’t get off to the best start with two samples of this old flagship having to be cast aside before finding one that could muster anything more than stock performance. Apparently, it took “days” to get the selected card to perform, with fine-tuning of curves, offsets, drivers, and APIs used – and a custom coolant loop – to rouse this respected champ of old.
We all get old, but TrashBench says that there was a brick-wall limit at 2.2 GHz for the best 1080 Ti he had on hand. Sadly, there are only so many rocket pods you can fit to an old silicon Zimmer frame before it topples over. At this stage of the video, it is admitted that the original “1080 Ti beats 5050 idea was dead.” Actually, things would be turned upside down.
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Plucky little RTX 5050 overclocked to 3.3 GHz
Attempting to give the RTX 5050 a fighting chance, TrashBench also boosted this little card’s cooling far beyond stock. As the water block he had was too large for the tiny 5050, a tower CPU cooler was applied to the GPU, with a fat fan attached.
The RTX 5050 came out fighting with TrashBench seeing a 3.3 GHz core clock, a 28% increase on the stock speeds. The extra shot of speed, coming from purely “raw offset” tweaking, precipitated a very respectable 17.55% gain, on average, in the handful of games TrashBench tested for this comparison. Compare that to the extra average uplift of just 3% TrashBench could achieve by tuning the old GTX 1080 Ti.
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The end result was that the - already better performing - RTX 5050 ended up eclipsing expectations with an awesome overclock and even better 1440p gaming benchmark results. Check out the charts above.
In addition to this excellent showing for the much maligned RTX 5050, TrashBench proudly announced that he pocketed the top six scores in 3DMark Time Spy for this GPU model. The rest of the system specs were respectably ordinary, consisting of an “5‑12600KF locked at 5.3 GHz with the e‑cores off for all the overclocked runs,” plus 32GB DDR4‑3200 CL16.
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TrashBench summed up the whole comparison experiment by explaining, “The 1080 Ti was meant to be the star, and the 5050 stole the whole show.” However, with the rose-tinted GTX 1080 Ti glasses now truly slipped (four generations later), he added, “I didn’t see that coming. So, I guess it’s good night, Grandpa.”
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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
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gernstsmit Reply
Mmm, would have been impressed if the 5050 had more VRAM. As it stands this overclock is completely irrelevant, because of a lack of VRAM. Goes to show what "could have been" in a world were Nvidia is interested in brining the best value to their clients.Admin said:Plans to 'overclock a GTX 1080 Ti hard enough to embarrass Nvidia’s new RTX 5050' didn't go quite as expected.
Crazed modder discovers RTX 5050 is actually faster than a 1080 Ti — ends up overclocking Nvidia's plucky budget card to 3300MHz, swipes top six sc... : Read more -
dalauder Is a 28% clock speed OC worth an article these days? Back before I had kids, I had two GTX 460s that I got to 33% and 50% stable overclocks and I didn't do fancy modding. Stuff just doesn't overclock these days--probably because nothing has a responsible amount of thermal headroom when shipped anymore.Reply
CPUs burning up and GPUs melting cables--it's because the chip makers are claiming huge performance uplifts, when really they're just shipping less stable and pre overclocked products for half of their "generational uplift". Now GPUs are just generating frames for "improvement".
It also means we're not hitting rated performance because everything throttles in real usage. Stop buying new overpriced hardware people. I'll keep buying used and 1 or 2 generations old. -
mwhannan74 Reply
Amen brotherdalauder said:Is a 28% clock speed OC worth an article these days? Back before I had kids, I had two GTX 460s that I got to 33% and 50% stable overclocks and I didn't do fancy modding. Stuff just doesn't overclock these days--probably because nothing has a responsible amount of thermal headroom when shipped anymore.
CPUs burning up and GPUs melting cables--it's because the chip makers are claiming huge performance uplifts, when really they're just shipping less stable and pre overclocked products for half of their "generational uplift". Now GPUs are just generating frames for "improvement".
It also means we're not hitting rated performance because everything throttles in real usage. Stop buying new overpriced hardware people. I'll keep buying used and 1 or 2 generations old. -
thisisaname I would be surprised if a 8 year old card could not be beaten by a highly modded neww card.Reply
By the looks of it he did not even do anything to the 180Ti before he "tried" to overclock it. Given how old it was some new thermal paste would help in overclocking it.
Showing that the 1080Ti was going to beat the 5050 was never going to be his "story" given that he did nothing to the 1080Ti other than "try" to overclock it. -
thisisaname Stock vs stock would have been better, mod both or mod neither. Anything else is unfair!!Reply -
Eximo Not that surprising. Leaving out architecture improvements, stats wise the GTX 1080 and the RTX 5050 are really quite close. 5050 has a clock speed advantage. So overclocking it even more, yeah, easily makes up the difference in CUDA cores and bandwidth advantage the 1080 Ti has.Reply -
thestryker I'd be surprised if it was a victory across the board even with the overclocking disparity. GN did a retest of the 1080 Ti last year and found its performance is somewhat all over the place which isn't surprising given the architecture's age: https://gamersnexus.net/gpus/greatest-gpu-all-time-nvidia-gtx-1080-ti-gtx-1080-2024-revisit-historyReply -
derekullo Reply
At least it wasn't ... Shades of Grey !cknobman said:Four shades of blue for two different cards in the bar graph.
Sheer genious!