Nvidia's latest launch involved two cards, the GTX 660 and GTX 650. We already tested the faster one, here, and its performance ranks somewhere between the HD 7870 and HD 7850. Today, we'll check out the GTX 650 and see how this card priced at around €100 fares against the competition, such has HD 7770 or GTX 550 Ti.
The GTX 650 is based on the GK107 GPU that Nvidia showed in June when it launched the GT 640. The GPU has two SMX units with 384 CUDA cores, 16 ROPs and 32 texture units. The GTX 650's performance bump from GTX 640 isn’t down to a new architecture however, just the clock. Namely, while the GTX 640 GPU runs at 900MHz, the GTX 650’s ticker runs at 1050MHz.
Point of View / TGT realized there’s no real fun without a more serious overclock and clocked its GTX 650 Ultra Charged as much as 131MHz higher, which equates to 12 percent. Memory overclocking helped the card to get a better bandwidth, up from reference 80GB/s to 89.6GB/s.
Unlike the rest of Kepler-based GTX cards, GTX 650 has no Boost technology, meaning the card runs constantly at its highest possible clock, which is 1189MHz in Ultra Charged’s world.
The GTX 650 Ultra Charged relies on single fan, dual slot cooling that shouldn’t have problems in cooling the card, but we’ll cover that in more detail later.
The GTX 650 has a 64W TDP and supports PCI Express 3.0, just like the rest of Kepler-based cards.