Sparkle GeForce GTX 650 Ti review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase

Okay so Sparkle delivered us their GeForce GTX650Ti SOC DF 1024MB GDDR5. 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, Sparkle clocks this card at 1006 MHz which makes it a good notch faster in its default configuration already.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 and manual.

Here you can see the Sparkle GeForce GTX 650 Ti, the 1GB Dragon series 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, a mini HDMI connector and DSUB. I would have preferred DisplayPort instead of that analog DSUB.

The PCB design is custom as well as the cooler. Sparkle embedded a Dual Fan  cooler which will remain absolutely silent whilst keeping the cooling performance really low. 

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 = PCI E 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 for a card in this class 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 and the SMT traces are there for the 2 GB models of this card. Mind you that these cards do not have SLI connectors.

Although a reference cooler is perfectly fine, this dual-fan solution will up performance a notch. Good is that you will not be able to hear the card whatsoever and the temperatures under gaming load at give or take 50 Degrees C. 

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.