Kepler’s Swan Song arrives with a GTX
badge.
Nvidia has been popping out Kepler cards
Like a circus clown car since the company Launched its 6-series GPUs in early
2012, and now we finally reach the bottom of the GTX barrel with the $150 GTX
650 Ti. This card slots in right below the $230 GTX 660 and has Less of
everything Less CUDA, Less memory (and a narrower memory bus width, and less
PCB.
Gigabyte
GeForce GTX 650 Ti OC
Though a 6-inch PCB is certainty not small cough
it makes the 650 Ti the smallest card we’ve tested in a while. Since this
particular board is overstocked, Gigabyte has bolted on a dual-fan cooling
mechanism that adds three inches to the card’s length. Gigabyte has also
doubled the card’s RAM allotment over the reference design to 2GB. The extra
RAM and cooling adds $20 to the price tag, as well.
In addition to the down-spec’d nature of
the GTX 650 Ti, it’s also missing two performance-related features: SLI for
dual-card gaming and GPU Boost functionality, so the board won’t overclock
automatically during gaming. To its credit though, Gigabyte ships this card
over clocked by 107MHz, and you can crank it up even further via the company’s
OC Guru II software. Given its massive cooling apparatus, we’re sure the card
can handle it.
Gigabyte
has also doubled the card’s RAM allotment over the reference design to 2GB.
In testing, the Little gipper outperformed
AMO cards in a similar price range, besting both the Radeon HO 6850 and HD 6870
by small to medium margins. However, our target is 60fps at 1920x1200, and when
using that standard the card fell short. Granted, we turn everything up to
Ultra or High and enable 4x AA. so we could have dialed things down a bit and
probably hit 60fps in Dirt 3, Batman, and Just Cause 2. Since we’re already at
77fps in Far Cry 2, that would mean possibly reaching our goal in four out of
eight games; not bad for such a small video card. The trouble is that the
Radeon HO 7850 costs just $20 more, has CrossFire support, and was faster in
almost every test we ran, making a final choice slightly more difficult.
If you have a rock-solid $150 budget, we
have no reservations recommending a stock GTX 650 Ti, and the Gigabyte version
is even better for an extra $20. But if you have even $10 more you should go
with the Radeon HO 7850 since it’s a faster card.
