NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Review: Bringing Balance To The Force
by Ryan Smith on March 26, 2013 8:00 AM ESTThe Test
Since the reference GTX 650 Ti Boost is completely identical in build to the reference GTX 660, let’s jump right into our tests.
NVIDIA’s launch drivers for the GTX 650 Ti Boost are the recently released 314.21 driver set, which as an aside we’ve discovered fix Titan’s OpenCL issues and we’ll be following up on that next month. Meanwhile for the rest of our cards we’ll be reusing our data from last week’s 7790 launch, so 314.21 for the other NVIDIA cards, AMD driver 12.101.2 for the 7790, and Catalyst 13.2 B7 for the rest of the AMD cards.
Please note that the GTX 650 Ti Boost NVIDIA is sampling is the 2GB card. We’ll take a look at 1GB cards later once those arrive, since they were a late addition.
On a side note, by the time you’re reading this, this will be the third major GPU article we’ve posted in as many business days, and we still have one more to go tomorrow. So we apologize in advance for not having had the time to run any additional NVIDIA cards besides the 600 series; we’ll get that caught up in Bench once this batch of launches and conferences is over.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Monitor: | Samsung 305T |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 7850 (2GB) AMD Radeon HD 7790 AMD Radeon HD 7770 AMD Radeon HD 6870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost (2GB) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 314.21 AMD 12.101.2 7790 Press Beta AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta 7 |
| OS: | Windows 8 Pro |
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trajan2448 - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
Seems a little disingenuous to avoid comparisons to its direct competitor, the7790, which it handily beats and has better frame delivery times. It wasn't designed to go against the 7850, and you guys know that.FearfulSPARTAN - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
Nvidia seems to thinks so, cant remember the article but Nvidia said the gtx 650 ti boost beat the 7850 in several games, all of them just so happen to be nvidia optimized games though.Ryan Smith - Friday, March 29, 2013 - link
At $169 for the model we reviewed it sure is. It's the $149 1GB card that we need to look at if we want to make meaningful 7790 comparisons.marees - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
"the best card is going to be the card you can afford."The above conclusion should be revised as "the best card is going to be the card+power_supply+cooling_solution you can afford."
I would like a gddr5 card <=$200 which can play latest games at 1080p at the max settings allowed by budget. But I dont want to screw-up my entire pc due to wrong choice of Power Supply or Cooling system/case.
I am sure this has been discussed somewhere before, if not can Anand and his team create a bench / post article to analyse the playable settings of different gddr5 cards along with the additional investment required in terms of case & power supply, esp from a budget gamer point of view - a person for whom it is nice to be able to game, but actually uses the pc mostly for browsing facebook and doing office work.
rbfowler9lfc - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
Why "Ti Boost"? GTX 660, 660Ti, 650, 650Ti and now 650TiB. So many suffixes, that's confusing for the average joe! Why not just plain GTX 655?!?MrSpadge - Tuesday, April 2, 2013 - link
Agreed - this is totally ridiculous!They've already got up to 3 letters for prefixes (but always use the same GTX on any card half-interesting for actual 3D work), 100 different numbers in each generation, now an additional suffix "Ti". Yet that's still not enough, we need another suffix...
Based on performance these should be:
GT640 - GT640
GTX650 - GTX640
GTX650Ti - GTX650
GTX650Ti Boost - GTX655
Darbyothrill - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
This may very understandably not be a big consideration for many people, but this card appeals to me a great deal as I am interested in running a Steam Linux Box, and the AMD drivers are currently in an atrocious state for linux. I overall think the AMD cards are more compelling for the price right now, but this is a decently priced nVidia solution.vaibhav81 - Friday, April 12, 2013 - link
guys,I am going to build custom gaming pc. And I Have selected this card for my pc.Can you suggest me other compatible hardware requirement for this,e.g.MotherBoard,PSU,Processor,Case,monitor??lower price will be good.