Nvidia’s RTX 5050 may not be a powerhouse of a GPU, but one modder has taken the 3DMark world record with real-world performance gains of around 20%. To achieve this, they had to hook the card up to a camping chiller, which dropped the GPU core temperatures well below zero degrees, and shunt-mod it with boatloads more power. Still, the results are undoubtedly impressive.
The RTX 5050 is an entry-level GPU in every respect. For around $300, you get a card that’s roughly as powerful as an RX 7600, or an RTX 4060, with access to multi-frame generation (though you don’t want to use that unless frame rates are at least 60 frames per second on average). It’s perfectly fine for playing esports and indie games, but you’d want something more powerful for anything above 1080p and medium settings.
But if you hook up a powerful chiller and pump it full of extra watts, it can be much faster. YouTube TrashBench hooked up a “Techni-Ice Camping Freezer,” a unit designed to keep drinks cool and freeze food on camping trips, and used liquid metal for the interface. That was able to get the chip down to a frosty -15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit) even when in operation.
With a shunt mod effectively unlocking as much power as the YouTuber wanted to pump through the card, they were able to get its boost clock from 2,820 MHz, all the way up to 3,468 MHz. That’s around 23% higher clock speeds.
The performance results speak for themselves. Time Spy went from 10,211 to 12,058. Port Royal from 6,131 to 7162. Heaven went from 6,792 to 7,953. Cyberpunk 2077 jumped from 164fps average to 194fps, too.
In most cases, TrashBench is now the record holder for RTX 5050 benchmarks. That’s partly because most overclockers focus on the top cards, but also because my goodness, that’s a big overclock.