My (anecdotal) experience is that backplates do improve temps but a tiny margin, <2C at best. On higher-powered cards which run hot, a good thermal-pad-and-backplate arrangement does pull a little heat off the PCB. Lesser cards don't benefit as much from backplates because the front-side cooling is already enough to keep them fairly cool, less excess heat on the PCB means less heat can transfer to the backplate. And, to be fair, most backplates are primarily cosmetic, many don't mate well with thermal hotspots or even bother to mount thermally conductive pads/fillers, very few backplates (that I've seen) are designed with functionally efficient heat transfer or heat radiation in mind. Yes, there are some bad (even very bad) backplate designs out there which will actually increase real temps on the GPU card.
1050Ti is one of the weakest of the
NVIDIA GeForce 10 Series cards - 1030, 1050, 1050Ti, 1060, 1070, 1080, 1080Ti, Titan X (GP102), Titan Xp.
It's roughly one-fifth as powerful as a 1080Ti. It has 4GB GDDR5 - comparable to a GTX980. Yet reference 1050Ti VRMs are much more efficient than those seen on the very fastest of the fastest factory-overclocked GTX980 cards (Galax HOF and EVGA Kingpin), and those volt-modded cards pulled far more than 150W.
Reference 1050Ti cooling is a standard active heatsink arrangement with one centered fan. Many 1050Ti cards are actually "half-sized" versions with stripped-down VRMs and cooling, yet they overclock fairly well. The
Strix 1050Ti is a "full-sized" card with DirectCU II cooling (which has direct contact only with the GPU but also covers the VRM and VRAM components), it has two better-and-larger-than-reference fans, it has a backplate, it follows reference PCB and VRM layout (for compatibility, I think) but it uses far better quality components with substantially higher performance specs.
So I'm of the opinion that a Strix 1050Ti should easily overclock well with the ASUS-provided cooling.
You do understand that the VRM and VRAM hardware is immediately adjacent to the main GPU ASIC - as physcially and electrically close as possible in circuit to maximize signal integrity and minimize response latency - so it's also covered by the DirectCU II heatsink (which is itself all covered by forced airflow)? This is already "active" VRM cooling, quite comparable to what's on the Galax card although perhaps not as hyped in the marketing, it just doesn't get more "active" without putting (small) direct-contact heatpipes onto the (small) VRM chips themselves - and that would consequently leave less space to put (big) heatpipes onto the (big) GPU ASIC. And - assuming the Strix 1050Ti lacks the thermal pads seen on the Gigabyte card - you can purchase enough of the very-highest-efficiency thermally conductive pads/strips to cover the entire card for a little less than five bucks.
Although I'm with the others in this thread - I ask whether you've actually observed "unacceptable" high temps on an overclocked Strix 1050Ti or if you're just shopping for the very best of the best overclocking 1050Ti card you can find? If it's the latter then I'd even go so far as to say don't waste your time, the Strix is perhaps the best and certainly among the best at overclocking and cooling, but it's still a waste of time compared to a GTX1060 or better, lol.
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