MSI GeForce GTX 650 Ti review - Introduction

You've probably just read our reference review on the GeForce GTX 650 Ti from NVIDIA. However obviously there will be a lot of board partners releasing several SKUs based on the new silicon as well. In this review we look at the MSI GeForce GTX 650 Ti Power Edition

NVIDIA recently released the somewhat entry level GTX 650, but it is performing at Radeon 7700 levels game performance wise. That means that there was a gap left open up-to the Radeon 7800 series. To fill that gap NVIDIA now is releasing one more product, it's the all new  GeForce GTX 650 Ti (with that Ti indicating a distinct  difference).

See the regular GTX 650 comes heavily castrated with just 384 shader cores whereas the Ti model is released with a much better 768 CUDA cores (shader processors) and a 925 MHz GPU clock (for the reference products). So that's nearly double the processing performance. The budget graphics card series for gamers therefore just got a little more interesting. Albeit we say that 150 USD/EUR should not exactly really carry the tag budget.

But if you do not want (or can not)  to spend heaps of money on your HTPC card or simply game in resolutions lower then 1920x1080 then for the 150 bucks the GeForce GTX 650 Ti positions itself smack-down in-between AMD's Radeon HD 7770 and 7850, and that really is a comfortable spot to be in for many of you.

Being based on the Kepler GPU architecture yet  obviously NVIDIA did not want to make yet another separate chip. So The GTX 650 Ti is the same one used on the regular GTX 660, yup the GTX 650 Ti is using the "GF106" silicon opposed to the GK107 being used on the regular 650 model (it's confusing as heck we know).

However that  GK106 silicon is armed with 768 active shader processor cores divided over four processor clusters running at 930 MHz on the reference products. That means that the GeForce GTX 650 Ti packs decent enough punch whilst consuming a relatively small amount of power. Interesting to know is that the 650 series all have a fixed 3D clock, so there is no dynamic boost aka Turbo functionality or anything. Thanks to that it actually overclocks really well you will find out in our AIB/AIC reviews.

The board partners will released two models of the 650 Ti series, one with 1 GB and the other one 2GB of 5GHz GDDR5. The big bad limiter however will be the the memory bus width, it is 128-bit memory and that will have a seriously impact on the overall rendering and compute performance. 

Overall the GeForce GTX 650 Ti, as we'll demonstrate, has enough horsepower to step into the DX11 games at up-to 1600x1200 resolutions, with the somewhat dated titles a resolution of 1920x1080/1200 will actually be playable as well. And if you can forfeit to medium quality settings in a game and don't do any crazy stuff Anti-aliasing wise, it's definitely plausible to play games really nicely at such resolutions versus acceptable framerates.

So in today's review we'll look at the 650 Ti from MSI, in specific the Power Edition. The SKU comes with a customized PCB, the Cyclone II cooler and in fact is factory overclocked towards 993 MHz on the core clock frequency. Have a peek at what is the MSI GeForce GTX 650 Ti power edition offers, and then head on over next page please.