GTX 1080 Ti vs RTX 5050: Budget Card Outperforms Flagship in Overclocking Challenge

Graphics card enthusiast TrashBench recently conducted an experiment comparing the GTX 1080 Ti, a long-standing flagship from the Pascal era, with the RTX 5050, a newer budget-focused GPU from Nvidia's Blackwell era. The results were surprising, with the RTX 5050 outperforming the 1080 Ti both at stock settings and after an aggressive overclock. TrashBench initially aimed to overclock the 1080 Ti to outperform the RTX 5050, but the effort proved difficult. He discarded two 1080 Ti samples before finding one that could exceed its base performance. After days of adjusting curves, offsets, drivers, and APIs, along with implementing a custom coolant loop, the best he could achieve was a maximum clock speed of 2.2 GHz. He noted that pushing the older card further was impractical due to hardware limitations. At this point, he admitted the original idea of the 1080 Ti beating the 5050 was no longer viable. To give the RTX 5050 a chance, TrashBench modified its cooling system, using a tower CPU cooler and a large fan instead of the stock water block, which was too big for the small card. This allowed the RTX 5050 to reach a core clock speed of 3.3 GHz, a 28% increase over its stock speed. The boost led to a 17.55% average performance gain in the games tested, far outpacing the 3% improvement he managed with the 1080 Ti. The RTX 5050 not only exceeded expectations in gaming benchmarks but also dominated 3DMark Time Spy, with TrashBench securing the top six scores for the model. The rest of the system used in the test was standard, featuring an Intel 12600KF processor locked at 5.3 GHz with e-cores disabled, and 32GB of DDR4-3200 CL16 memory. TrashBench concluded the experiment by noting that the 1080 Ti was originally intended to be the standout performer, but the RTX 5050 unexpectedly stole the spotlight. He admitted he hadn’t anticipated the outcome, saying, “I didn’t see that coming. So, I guess it’s good night, Grandpa.”