MSI GeForce GTX 1650 Gaming X Review - Introduction

MSI GeForce GTX 1650 Gaming X review 

MSI is back, this round with the GeForce GTX 1650 Gaming X edition of the GeForce GTX 1650. Designed to be a budget-friendly product MSI still did mount a pretty impressive cooler, a Twinfrozr revision 7 one with dual-fans. For a bit more fun, MSI also added a 6-pin power connector, perhaps that's good news for tweaking. Oh and it's overclocked right out of the box for you as well.

The GeForce GTX 1650 will bear a minimum price tag of roughly US$ 179 for the better cooled and designed AIB models. These cards are fitted with 4GB GDDR5 memory based upon a 128-bit memory bus. While the clock frequencies of the GPU base and boost frequencies will vary a bit per board partner, the reference base clock speed is close to 1400 MHz. When the first rumors on the GeForce GTX (yes, with a G) surfaced, speculation was everywhere and we had doubts NVIDIA would actually release a new GTX while moving forward towards it's RTX branding. NVIDIA is now injecting Turing based GPUs into the mainstream called TU116 and this new GU117. To make it more affordable NVIDIA stripped away the RTX and DLSS features, that means there are no RT and Tensor cores in these products. It's a fall back towards the original shader design model.

So to quickly recap; the 1650/1660 series is making use of the Turing architecture but will not have Raytracing and Tensor cores, this is why NVIDIA dropped the RTX suffix back to GTX. The GeForce GTX 1650 cards are to occupy a 149 to 179 USD price domain slash pricing level which coincidentally also is occupied by the AMD Polaris 20-based Radeon RX 570 series.

	GTX 1060	GTX 1650	GTX 1660	GTX 1660 Ti	RTX 2060
GPU	GP106	12nm FF TU117	12nm FF TU116	12nm FF TU116	12nm FF TU106
Shader cores	1280	896	1408	1536	1920
Memory	6 GB / 3GB GDDR5	4 GB GDDR5	6GB GDDR5	6GB GDDR6	6GB GDDR6
Memory bus	192-bit	128-bit	192-bit	192-bit	192-bit

The reference frequencies for the GTX 1650 series are quite decent, with a reference base and boost clocks at 1,485 and 1,665 MHz respectively. The new cards, (if priced right) will serve NVIDIA's entry-level to mainstream segment and should offer a capable 1080p solution. NVIDIA is not distributing a reference design card to the media. Ergo, the reviews you'll see are based on AIB designed partner cards. 

MSI Gaming X 

The 1650 series graphics cards are once again based on Turing architecture, offering just that fundamental shading engine. The GPU has been cut-down, the available memory configurations will be 4GB GDDR5 (8 Gbps) running a 128-bit wide bus. This 75 Watt rated graphics card has 896 active shader processors. MSI fires off a proper boost clock to the card at a nice 1860 MHz domain. Having smaller TU117 silicon it doesn't run too hot and in fact, is really energy efficient. The cooler is following a dual-slot TwinFrozr 7 design. The card comes with one power connector  (6-pin PCIe). It might not have any RGB embedded, but it still is an attractive product, easy to drop in. The card offers one HDMI and 2x DisplayPort. This Turing 117 GPU empowered product keeps that GPU at roughly 65 Degrees C marker depending on game load. This compact card is based on an OC model, meaning a stock properly tweaked Boost clock. The GDDR5 Micron-based memory has been not been tweaked.