Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB Graphics Card Review

When we look at reference cards, we find that there normally isn’t any aspect that stands out so its hard for us to summarise and of course to award a product like this, if its worthy of one but we find the 650 Ti is slightly different as it stood out in certain areas.

The 650 Ti was manufactured to compete with AMD’s lower-end models and it does exactly that by outperforming the Radeon HD 7750 and 7770, and while it doesn’t steam ahead, it’s still ahead none the less and that’s all that matters in this tight-neck battle that we’ve seen between AMD and Nvidia over the years.

We can’t really comment much on the design of the card, as you will only see a small amount of this card popping up in the retail channel, as Nvidia would much rather let MSI, Palit and Asus among other brands harness the technology and make it their own which generally consists of custom coolers, raised clock speeds and their own unique spin on things.

In terms of performance, the card showed some strong numbers and for a retail price of around £110-£120 depending on which model you go for and from which manufacturer, it certainly offers value for money, even when compared to the HD 7770 from AMD which offers slightly less performance but for close to the same price which is exactly what Nvidia needed to do here. To simply offer something better for the same price and this is what makes them a market leader.

Now there was one part of the card that blew our minds and really stuck out and that was the overclockability. With higher-end cards, you expect to see some high increases in GPU and memory clocks due to the cooling solutions that get bolted onto the cards, but finding that we can increase the clocks by such large amounts from a card that has a reference cooling design is simply remarkable and this will increase the performance levels even closer to 7850 territory as we saw this card just behind the 7850 in certain tests.

Overall, the card offers exactly what it was set out to offer, and thats fantastic value for money and anyone wanting to play games on medium settings won’t be disappointed, though we wouldn’t recommend harnessing the higher-end technologies such as higher resolutions and namely Nvidia Surround as it will struggle slightly and a GTX 670 and upwards would be much better suited for this task, though for productivity, this card will run 3 screens all day, absolutely fine. What Nvidia partners continue to do with this card now is exactly what we hoped for, by increasing the clocks and raising the cooling performance and this will all help to make this card an extreme overclocker.