MSI Gaming X GTX 1650 Graphics Card Review

How Much Does It Cost?

This MSI GTX 1650 is available now for £179.99 in the UK or $184.99 in the US. That’s not cheap and around £50 over the MSRP for “stock” cards. However, you are paying partly for the name, but also a lot materials. That cooler is huge and doesn’t come cheap. However, it’s a great looking card and very well made, if you don’t mind paying for overall quality.

Overview

This card puts me in a tough spot, as it’s just a bit too expensive for the market, at least at launch. If MSI can get that price down even £10, it’ll have a lot more appeal and be price just below the MSI RX 570 OC models. The performance is good though, and the attention to build quality and design is certainly worthy of merit. Then again, we wouldn’t expect anything less than that from MSI these days.

Performance

The GTX 1650 cards trade blows with each other quite nicely. It’s obvious that the MSI card with its extra power connector and bigger cooler gets a boost over the cheaper PCIe power only stock cards too. While we benchmarked at High, just dialling that down a tiny bit would get you over 60 FPS in almost anything. It’s a great affordable gamers GPU for under £200 though. What’s most impressive is that it uses less than half the power of its nearest AMD rival. That’s going to make a noticeable difference on your power bill.

Should I Buy One?

If you’re in the market for a GTX 1650 class card, this is certainly one of the best of the bunch. It’s competitive with the cheaper Gigabyte card. However, MSI’s card does look a lot nicer (sorry Gigabyte), and the build quality is without a doubt, superb. Get that price down £10-15 MSI and I’ll put an editors choice award on this.