Palit GeForce GTX 1650 KalmX review

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Introduction

Palit GeForce GTX 1650 KalmX review 

In this review, we look at the Palit KalmX edition of the GeForce GTX 1650. It's a passively cooled product that was designed for users on a budget, the card breathes and oozes that. This model comes with a rather extraordinary cooler in a rather small compact design. 

The GeForce GTX 1650 will bear a minimum price tag of roughly US$ 149~179 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, which 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.


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  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. 

Palit KalmX

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. For this review, we are testing the KalmX that obviously is intended for small and silent form-factor PCs. KalmX is all about silence as this unit is passively cooled, meaning it has been fitted with a cooling system that has no active fans. Your cooling performance relies solely on that nice radiator and a bit of airflow inside your chassis (and this last bit, of course, needs to be right). The end result is impressive as you will be working in Windows or sure, gaming in cheer silence. Having smaller TU117 silicon it doesn't run too hot and in fact, is really energy efficient. The card does not with a power so it feeds 100% off the PCIe slot. Neither does it have any RGB embedded. This Turing 117 GPU empowered product keeps that GPU at roughly 80 Degrees C marker (max) depending on game load. 

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