Hey guys, Jarrod here and today we’re going to be benchmarking two similar laptops to
compare the older Nvidia 970M against the newer 1050Ti to see just how much better the
newer Pascal based card performs, and find out if it’s worth upgrading to.
I've previously tested the 970M against a 1060, however I’ve since had some requests
to also compare it with the 1050Ti, so now that I've been able to get my hands on a laptop
with a 1050Ti I’ll be testing the differences here.
First let’s discuss the other differences between these two laptops.
Both are running slightly different CPUs, the laptop with the 970M has an older Intel
Skylake 6700HQ quad core CPU at 2.6GHz, while the newer laptop with the 1050Ti has an Intel
Kabylake 7700HQ quad core CPU at 2.8GHz.
While this may affect some of the benchmarks, as the newer laptop doesn't have the exact
same CPU, the majority of tests are graphics based, however just be aware that a small
percentage of the difference may be due to the difference in CPU.
I suggest that you look at my recent video where I compared the differences between these
two CPUs if you're interested in further information on this, but basically they perform very similarly
with not too much difference.
Both laptops have 16GB of DDR4 RAM, however the older laptop with the 970M runs at 2,133MHz
while the newer laptop with the 1050Ti runs at 2400MHz.
Both use an SSD for the primary hard drive and are running Windows 10 with all available
updates applied.
No manual overclocking was performed for any of these tests, and neither laptop supports
G-Sync.
The main difference here is of course that one laptop is running with an older Nvidia
GeForce GTX 970M, while the newer laptop has an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti.
We can see straight away that the specs are a bit different, in particular the 970m has
more cuda cores, but it’s not clocked as high as the 1050Ti.
Let’s take a look at our benchmarks and find out how each of these cards perform!
We’ll cover both real world gaming benchmarks in terms of frames per second, as well as
the results of some benchmarking tools.
First we’ll start with the gaming benchmarks as these are most useful.
I’ve tested Battlefield 1, GTA 5, The Witcher 3, and Shadow of Mordor on both laptops.
In Battlefield 1 I used ultra settings with a 1080p resolution.
With both Direct X 11 or Direct X 12, both the 1050Ti and 970m performed basically the
same.
In GTA 5 I tested with FXAA on with MSAA set to x8 with a 1080p resolution and with VSync
off.
We can see that the results here are quite a bit different, where the 1050Ti came out
ahead.
In the Witcher 3 I used the Ultra preset, and disabled VSync and NVIDIA Hairworks, and
again ran at a 1080p resolution.
Once again both graphics cards performed very close to each other.
In Shadow of Mordor with ultra settings at 1080p, the 1050Ti is quite ahead just like
the GTA test.
The results are pretty interesting, different games obviously use a different amount of
CPU or GPU resources however I didn’t notice any CPU throttling during my testing with
either laptop.
Now onto the benchmarking tools, while a useful indicator note that these results are less
practical compared to the real world gaming tests previously shown.
In Heaven benchmark with the quality set to ultra, tessellation on extreme, and anti-aliasing
on x8 at 1080p, the 1050Ti scored 36 fps while the 970m was only slightly behind at 34 fps.
Valley benchmark produced a similar result, with the quality set to ultra and anti-aliasing
on x8 at 1080p, the 1050Ti scored 39 fps while the 970m was again just 2 fps lower.
With the 3DMark Time Spy and Firestrike benchmarks I’m only looking at the graphics scores
here rather than overall scores as that’s more useful for our purposes.
We can see that in both cases the 1050Ti is only slightly ahead here.
Finally let’s check the temperatures of each card during the testing, keep in mind
that the unique cooling solutions in each laptop are a factor so this isn’t a perfect
comparison.
In my testing with an ambient room temperature of 20c, I found the 970m to run a little cooler
at idle, however it was also a little hotter compared to the 1050Ti under load, but again
this will vary depending on the cooling solution of each laptop.
As expected the 1050Ti came out on top in most tests performing around 10.7% better
on average compared to the 970M, although it only seems to be so high due to the results
of GTA and Shadow of Mordor which performed around 40% better on the 1050Ti.
So is it worth upgrading to the 1050Ti if you already have a 970M?
Definitely not, based on these results that really doesn’t seem worthwhile, you’ll
only be looking at a small improvement overall.
If on the other hand you’re considering buying a new laptop with either of these cards,
then I’d suggest the newer 1050Ti as in general it does perform a little better and
ran a bit cooler for me, however if you can get a good deal on a laptop with a 970m you’re
probably going to get a similar gaming experience while possibly saving some money as there
are some good deals on them.
I hope that this video has shown you the real world differences in performance between the
Nvidia 970m and 1050Ti graphics cards, and helped you choose between them.
Let me know down in the comments which graphics card you’ll be getting in your next laptop
and why, and leave a like on the video if you found the information useful.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this
one.