The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Review, Feat. Gigabyte, Zotac, & EVGA
by Ryan Smith on October 9, 2012 9:00 AM ESTMeet The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti OC 2GB Windforce
Our final card of the day is Gigabyte’s entry, the GeForce GTX 650 Ti OC 2GB. Like the other cards in today’s review this is a factory overclocked model, with Gigabyte shipping the core clock at 1033MHz, 107MHz (12%) over reference and the same overclock as Zotac. Meanwhile the memory clock is unchanged at 5.4GHz.
With the weakest factory overclock of the bunch, Gigabyte’s claim to fame here will be their design, which significantly deviates from NVIDIA’s reference design. The PCB itself is clearly based on NVIDIA’s (right down to the 5.75” length) and is otherwise unremarkable, but Gigabyte’s cooler is another Windforce 2X cooler, making it significant different from the much smaller open air coolers on the rest of the cards we’ve seen. Though the design of the cooler in use depends on the specific model of card, all of Gigabyte’s Windforce coolers share the same basic design, featuring a long aluminum heatsink that runs the length of the card (if not beyond), attached to the GPU through the use of copper heatpipes (2 in the case of the GTX 650 Ti).
Meanwhile air movement is provided by a pair of ridiculously large 100mm fans that run the length of the heatsink. In fact “ridiculously large” is about the single best two-word description there is for the GTX 650 Ti OC’s Windforce cooler. As we’ll see it’s going to be very effective, but in all likelihood it’s overkill out of the box. Because of the length (and significant overhang) of the Windforce cooler, Gigabyte’s card measures 9.3” long and you’ll need an extra inch of vertical clearance too to fit the behemoth.
Outside of cooling, Gigabyte’s card is otherwise very typical for a GTX 650 Ti. Gigabyte has equipped the card 2GB of Hynix 6GHz GDDR5, so when you overclock – and with a cooler this big you must – there is at a minimum a fair bit of memory headroom to play with. Meanwhile along with the minor PCB changes Gigabyte has changed the display ports to fit their needs. Gigabyte’s card uses a stacked DL-DVI-D design, augmenting that with a full-size HDMI port and a VGA port. With the increasing performance and ubiquity of iGPUs, VGA ports have finally started to fall out of favor, so Gigabyte is alone in shipping their card with a VGA port instead of a DVI-I to VGA dongle.
Rounding out the package is the usual collection of power adapters and a quick start guide. While it’s not included in the box or listed on the box, the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti OC works with Gigabyte’s OC Guru II overclocking software, which is available on Gigabyte’s website. OC Guru isn’t quite up to the gold standard of overclocking software, but it’s functional, sleek, and gets the job done, which is great as with a cooler this large this card demands to be overclocked.
Wrapping things up, the Gigebyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti OC comes with Gigabyte’s standard 3 year warranty. Gigabyte will be releasing it at an MSRP of $174 ($169 without AC3), $25 over the price of a reference-clocked GTX 650 Ti and $5 less than the most expensive card in our roundup today.
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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.