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.
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.
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.
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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