Rebranding old products and selling them as part of a new generation isn’t anything new in the hardware market. AMD did it multiple times with Polaris, NVIDIA also does it with their lower-end SKUs and Intel too, has been rebranding its older Core i7s as the next-gen i3s (kind of). These practices although completely legit, draw a considerable amount of flak from enthusiasts and critics alike. The newest GPU to join the rebranded club is the upcoming GeForce MX350. Turns out that the MX350 is a variant of the Pascal-based GTX 1050. Of course, NVIDIA will never officially confirm this but we know better.
- NVIDIA_DEV.1C91.0922.1028 = “NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050”
- NVIDIA_DEV.1C94.3FD3.17AA = “NVIDIA GeForce MX350”
As you can see, the MX350 is going to be based on the same Pascal die as the GTX 1050. Let’s consider the specs for a moment:
| GTX 1050 (2GB) | MX350 (est) | MX250 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shaders | 640 | 640 | 384 |
| Boost Clock | ~1400 MHz | ~1500 MHz | ~1550 MHz |
| Memory | 2GB GDDR5 | 4GB GDDR5 | 4 GB GDDR5 |
| Bus Width | 128-bit | 128-bit | 64-bit |
| Memory Size | 7 Gbps | 7 Gbps | 7 Gbps |
Keep in mind that these are the speculated specs, not official figures provided by NVIDIA. We also have a benchmark, courtesy of the Chinese outlet, ITHome:
As you can see, the MX350 is 10-15% faster than the preceding MX250. Nothing extraordinary, but just about what you’d expect from a cut-down GTX 1050. We’ll keep you posted and update this story as we hear more.
