There was a time when I’d be chuffed to bits to be clicking a new entry-level graphics card into its PCIe home. Think back to the GTX 1050 Ti or the Radeon RX 570 – these weren’t just great GPUs because they were accessible, but because you could practically feel the scrappiness bouncing off their circuitry. Like barking little chihuahuas, throwing down against a pack of mastiffs. You can see they’re no match for the bigger boys. But you kind of love them for not caring.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 is no such card. It is the most affordable of the RTX 50 series, undercutting the RTX 5060 by about £40 / $50, and it does come with a full set of DLSS 4 tools including Multi Frame Generation (MFG) support. Its performance, sadly, leans more slow than scrappy, and it isn’t even really that cheap. Prices start around £220 / $250 and this overclocked Zotac model I’ve tested is £248 / $270, so it’s still going to be by far the priciest component in any budget PC build.

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It pays to know your enemy, so before writing this piece I prompted the free version of OpenAI's ChatGPT software to probabilistically derive a short article in the style of Edwin Evans-Thirlwell from the years of my writing OpenAI have scraped and processed without my consent. The client clipped together a fair approximation of a self-aggrandising lefty writer with a privileged education and a tendency to wank up his intros, but I didn't think the output read much like me. Too crisp and Powerpointed, too figured-out, too composed>. Still, perhaps the fault lay with the imprecise 'engineering' of my prompts.

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Samsung’s latest gaming monitor sale is packed with big discounts on some of its best displays, from lightning-fast esports panels to massive ultrawides built for full immersion. If you're after crisp 4K visuals, OLED contrast, or high refresh rates for competitive play in today's deals, you're in the right place. I've also sorted out a round-up of every discounted graphics card I could find, so there's no excuses for swiping an awesome battlestation upgrade today. Let's get into it:

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