MSI GeForce GTX 650 Ti review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase

Okay so MSI delivered us the Power Edition of the GeForce GTX 650 Ti. Obviously all board partners will offer a wide variety of models/SKUs with customized PCB's, coolers and memory configurations.

The reference card has a 925 MHz clock frequency, MSI clocks this card at 993 MHz which makes it a good notch faster in its default configuration already. There is no Turbo or Dynamic boost mode for this card. The effective memory data rate (128-bit) is kept at 5400 MHz which follows the reference standard, however as we'll check in the overclocking segment of this article, it can be tweaked rather well. It's GDDR5 though so that doubles up bandwidth giving this product 86.4 GB/sec of  bandwidth to fool around with.

Our card has been equipped with 1 GB of GDDR5 memory. But lets walk through the product guided by photo's. Above you can see th bundle. Included are the basics really like drivers, manual a mini-HDMI  to HDMI converter and a 6-pin power converter.

Here you can see the MSI  GeForce GTX 650 Ti, the 1GB Power Edition SKU (stock keeping unit) and its as you can see, nothing much is reference. Overall a nice yet simple looking card for what it is reality. Let's look at the card from several different viewpoints.

The card is equipped with the GK106 GPU that harbors the Kepler GPU architecture. You will spot two dual-link DVI connectors and a mini HDMI connector. Most board partners as such will deliver a mini-HDMI to normal sized HDMI converter.

The PCB design is custom as well as the cooler. MSI embedded a Cyclone II cooler which will remain absolutely silent whilst keeping the cooling performance really low. The cooler also comes with dust removal technology so at PC startup the fans will spin reversed for a while trying to get rid of dust. 

When we flip the card around we spot a 6-pin PEG power connector (BTW I get asked about it all the time but PEG = Pcie Express Graphics). With 75W leading though the PCIe slot and another 75 watt fed by the plug you'll have 150W available for potential overclocking, which isn't bad really.

Looking at the backside of the card we see a very non-complex PCB. As you can see there are SMT traces to be found for extra memory, abundantly indicating that this indeed is a model with 1GB of graphics memory.

The reference cooler is perfectly fine, you will not be able to hear the card whatsoever and the temperatures under gaming load remain under 50 Degrees C as well. The card is equipped with MSI's Military Class III components and MSI AfterBurner Triple voltage support. 

The card is PCIe gen 3.0 compatible. Going from PCIe Gen 2 to Gen 3 doubles the bandwidth available to the add-on cards installed, from 500 MB/s per lane to 1 GB/s per lane. MSI gives the card two DVI connectors (dual-link), one HDMI connector (mini size). Mind you that these cards do not have SLI connectors.