Asus GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost OC Edition 2GB Graphics Card

There are various areas that a graphics card product can be aimed at, and this includes the budget segment, mid-range and high-end, but we also have to look at the offerings that give fantastic performance for a great price, no matter whether they are the best performer or a run-of-the-mill card. The 650 Ti Boost from Nvidia is aimed at that segment, by wanting to offer up 1080p rich quality with high graphical settings, and still letting the user witness admirable frame rates. In Nvidia's eyes, the 650 series of cards was planned to be the "gateway" for gamers, as it was meant to allow them to experience 1080p gaming for the first time but sadly there was something lacking and is was the raw compute power of the core. Recently we saw AMD releasing their 7790 "Bonaire" graphics card to rival the original GTX 650 graphics card, but with a refresh offering more performance and some newer Nvidia technology, that we've seen lately applied to the GTX Titan, do Nvidia have the card they originally wanted in their 650 series lineup? The specs seem to suggest that it does with 768 CUDA cores, and a 192-bit memory interface, with our particular review today focussing on a 2GB overclock model. The stock 980MHz base clock gives a 5% increase over the original GTX 650 Ti and we see a higher texture fill rate of 62.7 Gigatexels/sec. The Asus model we are looking at today however, is an OC edition, meaning that we have an even higher clock that surpasses the reference speeds, and includes their patented DirectCU II cooling solution which has given us some amazing results in the past. Lets see if the new GTX 650 Ti can outperform the AMD Radeon HD 7790 and if adding the new technology and improved performance really does make a difference. Within the box we find the standard array of included accessories with a speed setup guide, VGA/DVI adapter and twin Molex to 6-pin PCI-Express power adapter. No driver CD came bundled with our sample, but this may not reflect the final retail product, but we would always advise to get the latest drivers from the Nvidia website to stay up-to-date. The DirectCU II cooler is an oldie but a goodie and is renowned as being one of the best cooling solutions on the market with its twin fan, twin heatpipe design and black/red styling on the shroud. The cooler incorporates two Asus branded fans with smoked blades. The DirectCU II cooler is known for being one of the most competitive in the market and remains silent, even when under extreme performance loads and is able to push sufficient airflow to keep the core cool. Obviously Nvidia have a proven track record when it comes to power deliverance and we find that this card has a TDP of 140 watts which is more than we expected, but for a card that has a fairly high clock speed and the ability to boost progressively, we have high hopes that the card can push forward. This is all down to a single 6-pin power connector located on the top of the card. The card comes equipped with a single SLI connector allowing 2-way SLI for those wanting to experience multi-GPU technology. The rear I/O of the card features a few ventilation holes to help with heat dissipation as well as a variety of display output connectors including a single and dual link DVI, a single HDMI and a single full sized DisplayPort. As we can see, the GXT 650Ti with boost still revolves around the GK106 core. What the key difference is, is the addition of boost technology to the card, to dynamically add extra performance to the stock clock speeds. On top if this, Asus have given the new card an overclock as well to give it an extra bit of performance in the right direction over the reference core clock of 980MHz. The test the performance of this card, we use the latest drivers direct from the manufacturer and run each test three times to obtain a fair average set of results. Test System: Asus Rampage IV Extreme Intel Core i7 3960X 16GB Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz Antec Kuhler 920 Corsair HX1050W Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD Lian Li T60 Dell U3011 We would like to thank Asus, Corsair, Kingston, and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Games used: Aliens Vs Predator Dirt Showdown Hitman: Absolution Metro 2033 Sleeping Dogs Hardware used: Plug-in electricity usage monitor Sound level meter Software used: 3DMark 11 HWMonitor Unigine Heaven Benchmark 3.0 Windows 7 Professional 64-bit 3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online. The addition of boost plus the higher clock speed from the overclock, puts the new 650 Ti back in the position where NVIDIA intended for it to be - ahead of the 7790. We find over the original reference 650Ti, the Ti with boost and shipped overclock sees a gain of around 30% in performance on the extreme Heaven is regarded to be one of the most intensive Benchmarking utilities about at the moment along with the likes of 3DMark. It makes use of highly comprehensive tessellation technology, advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) and a highly defined light algorithm to produce ever changing light conditions amongst other items. Like 3DMark, we find the 650Ti with Boost jumping up the charts, this time nestling between the performance levels of a 660 and 7850 with frame rates of at least 9fps more than before. Aliens Vs Predator is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that relies on DirectX 11 and high amounts of Tessellation in conjunction to give enhanced shadows and fantastic textures to the surrounds and characters within the game. Like Heaven, the new 650Ti brings itself right up the rankings sitting again just below a 660 Direct CU II dropping a couple of frames at each of our test resolutions. Dirt Showdown is a video game from Codemasters and is part of the Colin McRae Rally games revolving around a tour of events to compete in allowing you to win money and prizes to spend on new cars and upgrades as well as unlocking new events and races. The game uses high resolution textures and AA settings to simulate dust particles, terrain and damage to the vehicles. As we know, Dirt Showdown is heavily biased towards AMD cards but looking at NVIDIA cards alone we can see that the overclock and boost in the new 650Ti, brings it to a midpoint between a reference 650Ti and a GTX 660. Hitman: Absolution is an action-adventure stealth game developed by IO Interactive and published by Square Enix and is the fifth entry in the Hitman game series. The game runs on the Glacier 2 game engine and includes high levels of anti-aliasing, DirectX 11 technology, lighting effects and depth of field technology. Hitman as usual gave us a mixed bag of results with better frame rates at higher resolutions over the 7790, but at 1680x1050 we see the 7790 has the edge by a few frames. Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics-intense games on the market. Like Hitman, we find in Metro that hte 650Ti with Boost has had a bigger gain in performance at higher resolutions over the 7790, whilst at lower resolutions we find a gain of one or two frames. Sleeping Dogs is a 2012 open world action-adventure game based around Wei Shen; a Chinese-American police officer going undercover. The game utilises DirectX 11 features as well as high quality intensive reflections and high-resolutions textures. Finishing off with Sleeping Dogs the 650Ti with boost and Noise is generally the bain of most consumers lives and in the hope of finding the quietest operation, we feel it's necessary to show you the audio level of components. We use the same components throughout this test and use a sound level meter to record the audio level of the system with a passive graphics card installed. Once we have the level recorded with the passive card, we continue to change the graphics card for the one that we are testing. Due to us having the audio level recorded before installation, it gives us a guide to work with and shows that anything over our initial level is an audio gain. We know that Asus' DirectCU coolers are some of the best out there and with this card, we now find the top four spots in our acoustics chart taken up by one of these coolers. To test power consumption, we monitor the overall power of the system through a plug-in electricity usage monitor at an idle and load state. This allows us to show the fluctuation between how much power draw the graphics card takes at idle and at load. By monitoring the overall usage of the whole system, it gives an easy comparison if you wish to do the same yourself as opposed to buying very expensive individual testing equipment. The addition of the boost technology to the GK106 core has had a two fold effect with the idle power draw staying near similar to before, whilst under full load we find the power draw jump right up by around 50W compared to the older reference 650Ti. Measuring temperatures is all about being consistent therefore we keep a steady eye on monitoring the ambient room temperature to make sure that it stays the same. While this is constantly being monitored, we measure the idle temperature of the card using HWMonitor over a 15 minute period. Once this has been recorded, we set FurMark into motion for 15 minutes and record the results again. The addition of the boost on top of the DirectCU cooler, doesn't add to much to the overall load temperatures that we have seen with the card sitting mid-range in the charts. At idle we find the usual temperature average of 31 degrees being met. Overclocking the GK106 core is something that we have done many times before so we do know roughly where we should expect this card to get to. Unfortunately though, the silicon lottery has not played in our favour this time round with us only being able to get an extra 100Mz on the core clock speed on top of Asus 40Mz overclock. It still good to say that this is still a reasonable overclock and had we had a better chip I'm sure this would have seen closer to 1200MHz. When it came to overclocking the memory, we found that like all NVIDIA cards, the memory overclocks very well, but within 3DMark11, we don't notice that much of a gain in performance like we do when using an AMD card. Once overclocked, as mentioned we didn't see a significant gain from overclocking the memory, but with the GPU core overclocked, we saw a good gain over the shipped performance. At stock we achieved a 3DMark score of 1970 points and now we get 2138. The works out to an 8.5% gain in performance from a ~10% gain in core clock speed and a 16% gain in memory clock. We do know that the memory overclock with have an effect in real world gaming, but in this particular benchmark the results are not as profound Following the release of the 7790 and the announced launch of the updated 650Ti with boost, we can clearly see that the battle between AMD and NVIDIA is back on. The 7790 as we know blew the older 650Ti out of the water, but an announcement that NVIDIA were updating the 650Ti to counteract this performance soon stirred the pot right up. Across the board we find Asus' overclocked 650Ti with boost sitting just over a 7790 and in some cases very very close to the performance levels of a reference speed 660 as well. A lot of this is down to the dynamic boosting technology that ramps up the cards clocks based on the power envelope still available, but it does have a significant effect, saving the end user from having to overclock to get the performance instead. The other battle that we have to look at is on price, the particular sector of the market where this card lies, revolves around a solid, affordable price point for a product that also gives a very good level of performance for the money. Truth be told and NVIDIA have not failed to deliver on this front wither with the card set to be available for around £124 for the 1GB model and £140 for the 2GB model like we have here today. Given the jump in performance that we have seen over the previous generation of 650Ti due to the inclusion of GPU boost and an affordable price point, its safe to say that the battle between AMD and NVIDIA for this price point and market sector is well and truly back on. If you're looking at the 650Ti, all I will say is make sure you look out for one with boost technology as you will be pleasantly surprised.

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