GeForce GTX 650 MSI Power edition review - Introduction

The budget minded graphics card for gamers , the GeForce GTX 660, has just been released, however yet another card has been introduced .. at entry level.

It's the GeForce GTX 650, a card that is close to entry level pricing and performance. If you do not want to spend heaps of money on your HTPC card or simply game in lower resolutions then for not a lot of money the GeForce GTX 650 positions itself in-between AMD's Radeon HD 7750 and 7770. According to Steam data, over 90% of gamers purchase cards in the price range from $100-$299 and with the GTX 650, 660 and 660 Ti NVIDIA now has hammered that segment shut.

Being based on the Kepler GPU architecture yet an entry level product obviously NVIDIA had to make a separate chip, making the GK107 silicon and affordable offering, So please understand that this is again a new silicon "GF107" opposed to the GK106 being used on the 660 model and the GK104 being used on the 660 Ti, 670 and 680.

The GK107 silicon  is locked and loaded with 384 shader cores running at 1058MHz on the reference products, the GeForce GTX 650 packs a little punch, consumes very little power: just 64 watts. Btw the product has a fixed 3D clock, so there is no boost functionality or anything. It overclocks really well as you'll find out.

And with up to 2GB of 5GHz GDDR5 (128-bit) memory, the GeForce GTX 650 has some horsepower to step into the DX11 games at 1080p HD resolution, albeit ... that's a challenge with the modern games. But if you can forfeit to medium quality settings in a game and don't do any crazy stuff Antialiasing wise, it's definitely plausible.

The GeForce GTX 650 graphics cards will be launched in the 100~125 EUR range. In this review we'll look at the model from MSI as they submitted a sample as first. And what a beastly card for an entry level product this is, have a peek: