Alright, I admit, this got me baffled
I bought a Nvidia GTX1050 Ti a couple of months ago after going with GTX460 since like '09. The change was necessitated by modern games that started to lag a bit too much with the venerable GTX460.
So, I switched the cards, and off it went, quite evenly actually. I also increased the RAM capacity from 4 gigs to 16 gigs in my computer which is built with 2009ish stuff. But that's not the weird part. After a couple of uneventful months since the change to GTX1050, I'm starting to get really weird BSODing, mostly related to watching YouTube, but in the more recent developments, not necessarily limited to it. The computer can crash already at the Windows start up. Most of the time WhoCrashed lists the fault at Video Timeout Error, and the faulting module is named NVLDDMKM.SYS, which I believe is part of Nvidia's drivers. I did a short search of this and found out it's actually quite a common problem with NVidia cards.
However, this was not yet too alarming for me two weeks ago as the crashes happened once in a while, mostly with the internet browser and not that much in graphical heavy stuff such as gaming. (Take notes, never assume anything about the stability based on the current rate of crashes). So I went and bought a Samsung 4K monitor U28E570D to enjoy photoshopping closer to the actual camera resolution. My former monitor is a 24" display by Samsung too, at 1080p. So, the 4K monitor required me to use the DisplayPort in GTX1050, and there I plugged it.
Of course, I was quite fond of the 4K display on the desktop. But the surprise came when starting Street Fighter 5, at 4K the menu of the game was already very laggy. At that point I thought hur hur, GTX1050 not able to handle moving 4K stuff (no biggie for me, I can edit photos at 4K and play at 1080p), and I reduced the game resolution back to 1080p. Unfortunately, the lag didn't go away, and what formerly worked at 1080p and 60 fps is likely now far lower. Setting Windows 7 back to 1080p with the 4K display did not help either.
I have never seen before that changing a monitor could downgrade the performance of the graphics card that bad, so I tried to update the drivers. It didn't work, and the crashing became more frequent. Then I tried to revert back to the old drivers, but that doesn't help either. I've been running FurMark tests here, and I'm not getting anywhere near the performance of the card I think it should be able to do, 1280x720p at 4xAA is like 5-7 fps. I tried a burn in test for the CPU, and found the CPU cores around 50C after a minute, and stable. I've been using the computer for ray-tracing before and the CPU temperatures were never a problem there (this kind of work is also 100% load to the CPU). I'm also seeing a steady increase in the temperature of the GPU, but so far the highest I've seen is around 50 C. The card seems to stick around 66% power levels TDP.
Before attaching the 4K monitor to the computer, I was able to get steady 60 fps frame rates at 1080p with near max settings from Street Fighter 5 (don't ask for my CFN, I'm probably quitting the game) and a nice performance boost for Blood Bowl 2. So attaching the older the 1080p 24" monitor, the GTX1050 is suddenly not able to do anymore what it could before even with this display. I'm thinking two options, either Nvidia's new drivers are faulty, or the card is faulty, and this is some kind of cascading failure mode. The situation did not improve with downgrading the drivers to the GTX1050 release drivers, so I'm inclined to think it's a hardware problem. I think my MB is PCI-E 2.0 and GTX1050 is PCI-E 3.0, but even that shouldn't be a problem since the PCI-E buses should be backwards compatible? (Besides, it did work well enough before wandering to the 4K)
Anybody have any ideas about this? I think I'll try reverting back to GTX460 that I still happen to have around to get rid of the BSODing at least.
My specs:
Windows 7 64bit SP1
Processor: Intel i7 860 @ 2.8 GHz (no OC)
Motherboard: ASUS P7P55D
Memory: 4 X 4 GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600 CL 10 240 (I think they are operating at 1333 MHz, would need to check that from BIOS)
2xHDD (400Gb and 1Tb, no SSD)
1xDVD
PSU:ChiefTec CTF-700-14CS (have not opened the computer case to verify but that's the empty PSU case lying in my closet)
USB keyboard and a mouse.