Nvidia's GTX 1050 is based on the 14nm GP107 Pascal GPU, though the core is partially disabled, with one inactive SM. This leaves the chip 640 CUDA cores and 40 TMUs to work with. Nvidia limits the GTX 1050 to a maximum of 2GB of GDDR5, and like the more powerful GTX 1050 Ti, it has a TDP of just 75W.
It is my opinion that the 1050, and the 560 2GB on AMD side, are the bare minimum you should consider putting in a new PC, but they make a solid upgrade choice for people with cards back in DX 9 or 10 territory. Expect a 1050 to be decently playable now on a variety of games, but to begin showing its lack of grunt in new releases pretty rapidly. If your thing is older games, the 1050 will deliver a great experience for a low cost.
I would not recommend this card for anyone devoting their system to only gaming or only HTPC uses. If you need a gaming card go for the 1050 Ti, it isn't much more. If you need a card to throw into an HTPC that you plan on using for only streaming or emulators, the 1030 or 550 make more sense (if you are outputting to a 4k or high refresh rate display, for 1080 displays integrated Intel graphics will likely be fine). However, a system doing a little of both would be a good fit for the 1050
I would recommend this card to anyone looking for a cheap upgrade from a GTX 750 Ti or lower, or R7 260X or lower. Anything stronger than those and you can probably hold out longer and save more to get a 1060, or whatever NVidia's next generation mid range card will be.
Is this an article, or just an excuse to put up a list of affiliate links for a popular product? I have no problem with affiliate links, but I'd rather you just be transparent about it and put them all in one well-organized place rather than a mish-mash of pretend articles. This kind of "article" is like pcpartpicker if pcpartpicker sucked.
By putting the affiliate links all in one place, you mean like a list? Like the list above? We did that. So I guess your complaint is that we put some information with the list instead of just a list. Which I don't understand. How would having no information be better than giving reads basic specs and information about the products in the list?
I've decide not to support game developers who can't develop or optimize games without requiring "boutique" hardware and enormous downloads. In any other software industry these people would be unemployed. Give Rockstar credit for making GTA5 playable on most systems.