The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Review, Feat. Gigabyte, Zotac, & EVGA
by Ryan Smith on October 9, 2012 9:00 AM ESTMeet The GeForce GTX 650 Ti
Although none of NVIDIA’s partners will be selling direct copies of the NVIDIA reference design, NVIDIA did send over one of reference cards to serve as a baseline comparison (as it turns out, due to a bug you can’t underclock a GTX 650 Ti right now). Since most partner designs will closely follow NVIDIA’s reference design this actually works out for the best anyhow, as it offers a good insight into the kind of performance and design baseline we should see.
For the GeForce 600 series NVIDIA’s reference designs have been extremely solid (overclocking withstanding) and the reference GTX 650 Ti continues that tradition. The PCB itself is actually lifted from the GTX 650, which despite the difference in GPUs is pin-compatible with the GTX 650 Ti and its 128bit memory bus. This puts the length of the card at 5.75” – about as short as a PCIe x16 card can be – in a full-profile form factor. Meanwhile though taking inventory of every last electrical component isn’t practical, as near as we can tell the PCB and its components are completely identical to the reference GTX 650, which means partners are going to be able to easily drop the GTX 650 Ti into their existing GTX 650 designs so long as their cooling is adequate.
Speaking of cooling, the cooler on the reference GTX 650 Ti is a small but effective open air double-wide cooler. NVIDIA’s using a low-profile aluminum heatsink that covers roughly half the card, topped with an 80mm fan. This is the cooler style that most partners will mimic, as the 110W TDP of the GTX 650 Ti does not require a particularly large cooler; though on that note at 110W passive cooling is unlikely. As is common with open air coolers, the heatsink itself doesn’t make contact with the on-board RAM, so RAM cooling is left to airflow coming off of the fan.
NVIDIA’s RAM of choice for the GTX 650 Ti is their traditional favorite, Hynix 2Gb 6GHz GDDR5. The use of 6GHz RAM, which will be common across this family, means that the GTX 650 Ti will have some memory overclocking headroom right out of the box, memory bus willing. NVIDIA uses 4 pieces of it in a 4x32bit configuration, with 4 more pads on the back of the card for another 4 pieces for 2GB cards.
Moving on, along with losing GPU boost capabilities the GTX 650 family also gives up SLI capabilities, so unlike the GTX 550 Ti you won’t find a SLI bridge connector here. What you will find is 1 6pin PCIe power socket on the rear of the card for providing the extra power the GTX 650 needs. Meanwhile display connectivity is provided by 1 DL-DVI-I port, 1 DL-DVI-D port, and a mini-HDMI port. Since all of the Kepler GPUs support 4 displays the GTX 650 Ti can drive up to 3 displays via these connectors, and if a partner equips a card with a DisplayPort connector instead it should be possible to drive the full 4 displays off of a single GTX 650 Ti.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
91 Comments
View All Comments
Galidou - Saturday, October 13, 2012 - link
I won't be back on that thread anymore but just wait for some more stupidly stubborn reply of Cerise, that guy is just a show by himself. His level of global consiousness is below anything I have yet to see in the whole world.Sure he has some knowledge, can't deny it, it's just used in a way that seems like all that potential is totally WASTED, thrown to the garbage, buried in vomit and so on.....
Funniest shit ever.... LOL funniest comments ever..... Can't beleive it.....
Speelteveel - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
Please provide these benchmarks where the oc'd 650ti "flies" past the 7850.Its not a 50 buck price diff, its 20.
Also, in these benches above, the 7850 is not overclocked.
So basically, you advocate to pay $20 less for a card that you have to overclock to get similiar performance, when the $20 more expensive card when oc'd goes into another spectrum of perfomrnace that the 650ti can't even fathom. Oc'd 7850s break even with 7870 benchmarks at 1080p.
I'm not going to link you the benchmarks you can peruse google y yourself.
the 650ti can't compare to the 7850 at all. I'm no fanboy, I just found your post dissing fanboys while blatantly being blindly biased very amusing.
vbmluis - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
Yeah, I remember one, ATi HD 2900, heavy, big, noisy, power hungry, pricey and low performance.Jamahl - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
It's not bad. It's just slow, expensive and late.Samus - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
lol, that defines bad, man!But I'd argue...the only thing really wrong with this card is there isn't any good reason or it to be dual slot. with that power envelope, nVidia really could have rocked the house if this thing were a single slot, maybe even half height card (especially the 650 non-TI) because it's make a very powerful USFF/ITX PC GPU.
Aside form my dream of this card being single slot, it isn't a terrible card. The 650 Ti is mostly on par with the old 560 (which still costs more) while using less power and being half the length. Pretty much a no-brainer which one to buy there. But neither card is really worth $150-$180 when you consider you get substantially more (25-40%) performance from the 660 for just 20% more monies.
Blazorthon - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
Don't forget, the 7850 comes with games and so does the 7770. Coming with a game is necessary just to compete right now. The 7770 also has some highly factory overclocked models that can inch out the 650 Ti while still being cheaper. The 650 Ti would do better at $10 or $20 lower and a MIR is a great way to accomplish that since a lot of people forget to do them anyway, but buy the card because of the after MIR price.TheJian - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
Love defending AMD everywhere you go don't you :)Until you OC the 650 (or buy one already done, you act like they don't sell them on both sides OC'd) making your point moot. No phsyx either.
http://www.geforce.com/games-applications/physx
Even batman AA supports it. I don't think the 7770 comes with a current AAA title such as Assassins Creed 3 (doesn't get any more current than a game NOT even out yet). That will make a nice xmas gift to themselves for anyone buying one. Metacritic has a date of Nov20th, which is plenty of time for them to even be late a few weeks an still play over the holidays.
I'd be more than happy to have another round like we did at Toms if you'd like :) You start claiming MSAA crap again and we'll have a go...LOL
Please refrain from saying AMD is financially competitive with Intel here like over at Tom's, I don't want to waste my time burying that one again...ROFL.
abianand - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
I have a slight preference from AMD cards (I don't why and I don't like having a slight preference between two equally and fairly-competing brands).Having said that....
7850 is definitely faster, but look at the power consumption of the 650Ti. Even an overclocked 650Ti draws power that just equals a normal non-overclocked 7850. So, I wouldn't call the 650Ti a bad product at all, especially when it manages to touch 30fps in almost all settings in almost all games.
Samus - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
I have a preference for nVidia drivers, but these days both companies make solid chips. The real problem for AMD is all the games I play (mostly EA games) are optimized for nVidia architecture...like how Source was optimized for ATI architecture.Just how it goes.
Death666Angel - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
"Until you OC the 650 (or buy one already done, you act like they don't sell them on both sides OC'd) making your point moot."Wait, so you can't OC AMD cards? Oh that's right, you can. So that is meaningless, as any OC gains from Nvidia cards will be (likely) negated by OCing the respective AMD cards.