You know the graphics card market is in a bad place when vendors resort to rereleasing five-year old graphics cards. Kuroutoshikou, a Japanese vendor, has announced that its GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (GF-GTX1050Ti-E4GB/SF/P2) will hit the domestic market in mid-March.
In reality, the GF-GTX1050Ti-E4GB/SF/P2 is a rebranded version of Palit's GeForce GTX 1050 Ti StormX. Based on the GP107 (Pascal) silicon, the graphics card is equipped with 768 CUDA cores with a 1,392 MHz boost clock and 4GB of 7 Gbps GDDR5 memory. The GeForce GTX 1050 Ti is rated for 75W so it doesn't require any external PCIe power connectors, making it a good plug-n-play option for entry-level gamers, even though it is no longer among the best graphics cards.
The GeForce GTX 1050 Ti's revival isn't a coincidence though. It was Nvidia itself who decided to replenish its partners with Pascal GPUs in the middle of the ongoing graphics card crysis. Nvidia's actions also paved the way for other vendors to get rid of their old Pascal stock, including Palit who might launch new specialized GeForce GTX 1060 models for cryptocurrency mining.
We've already started seeing more GeForce GTX 1050 Ti availability here in the U.S. Sadly, the pricing leaves much to be desired. While Kuroutoshikou's GeForce GTX 1050 Ti will arrive in Japan with a price tag of ￥20,727 (~$190.97), custom models in the U.S. market currently retail between $330 and $600. That's pretty insane since the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti has five years under its belt now and had launched for $139.
With how ridiculous pricing is right now and the graphics card shortage, picking up a pre-built PC, especially one of the best gaming PCs, suddenly doesn't sound like a bad idea anymore.
