Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost review

While it's hard to ignore the big splash made by Nvidia's galumphing GeForce Titan,An experienced artist on what to consider before you buy chipcard. sales for such a high-spec card are inevitably made from only a fraction of the market. It makes for a spectacular showcase, but in reality the big money for these tech giants is elsewhere - specifically in nailing the absolute best performance-per-pound in popular games where an ideal price-tag for most GPU buyers remains within the 100-200 range. AMD thrives on its strong-hold over this bracket in particular, where the well-received HD 7850 currently retails for just 125, with the just-released 7790 model primed to strengthen this position in this sector at an even lower cost.

The issue for Nvidia is the massive gap this leaves in its Kepler range,A group of families in a north Cork village are suing a bestplasticcard operator in a landmark case. with the GTX 650 Ti and the 660 holding ground at 100 and 155 respectively. As a swift rebuttal, the GTX 650 Ti Boost sets out to fill that gap with a launch price of just under 145. However, considering this is hardly a direct price-match for AMD's output, and given that it's only a tenner less than the company's own GTX 660, does this actually represent good value for money right now?

Before we start, we must address the meaning of the "Boost" suffix. As a release it's an anomaly in the Kepler range, which over the last year eroded away the specs and features from the initial GTX 680 standard to suit lower and lower prices. Simply put, the GTX 650 Ti Boost reverts some of the cut-backs made for last year's 650 Ti. It brings back a fully-fledged GPU Boost mode, allowing the card's core clock to dynamically shift according to graphical demands of each application. The feature improves the performance of the card where there's an overhead in its maximum thermal design power (TDP), while also saving on power draw during idle states.

We also see the return of SLI support, though this is limited to a maximum of two GPUs rather than three - not a bother for most motherboard configurations which might match its price-tag. This makes it the cheapest SLI-compatible card in the current range.

There are other improvements over the standard GTX 650 Ti too. The rendering output unit (ROP) count takes a jump from 16 to 24, and core clocks go from 928MHz to 980MHz. Meanwhile, memory bandwidth benefits from a widening of the 128-bit bus to 192-bit - an important move for games running at higher resolutions. We also spot speeds going up for its attached 2GB of GDDR5 RAM, now clocked to 6GHz rather than the 5.4GHz of the cheaper card. It's a full-on improvement when taken from this angle, and is advertised to offer up to a 40 per cent advance in performance. The only downsides are the lengthening of the PCB itself, going from a convenient 14.5cm up to 24cm, and a bump up to a max TDP of 134.

There's another slant to this though: the comparison with the 660. It turns out that the face-off here is much simpler, and perhaps more revealing of the card's true origins. What we're seeing is the same PCB size and length, with each card's GK106 chip delivering identical core clocks - plus a matching boost up to 1033MHz.

So, rather than being an augmented 650 Ti at heart, it's much easier to describe this Boost edition as a 660 with a few cutbacks. The crux of it is that we're getting identical stats in every regard to this older card, with one of the big exceptions being the drop from 960 stream processors to 768 - accounting for one of the five SMX chips being chopped. The knock-on effect of this is a drop in the Boost's texture fill-rate from 78.4 Gigatexels per second down to 62.7. This detail comes to bear in our tests quite vividly, especially when running games at maximum settings at full 1080p.

Positioned dead-centre in the Kepler mid-range, the 650 Ti Boost aims to tackle the most technically demanding games of 2013 at full 1920x1080 - 1080p. This has widely become the standard resolution to shoot for due to the prevalence of cheaper LCDs,A group of families in a north Cork village are suing a bestplasticcard operator in a landmark case. even including IPS models. We resolve to use this resolution across all tests, while finding the ideal graphical preset in each game in a bid to hit 60FPS. We plant the card in our Core i5-2500k test rig, clocked to 4.An experienced artist on what to consider before you buy chipcard.2GHz and coupled with 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM. Drivers are also fully up-to date as of writing, with version 314.22 purporting to offer performance boosts up to 60 per cent in Tomb Raider.

To start off, we pit the Boost edition of the 650 Ti against the HD 7850 1GB edition, with Crysis 3's high calibre of visual effects and DirectX 11 features putting strains on each. The game scales well thanks to its flexible graphical presets, and in the end, we find the medium setting offers the most reasonable grade of performance without sacrificing the game's visual flair. Alas, the post-processing and particle effects seen on its high setting drag the frame-rate down to 25FPS during the rainy Post-Human stage, which forces a compromise. On medium we manage to hit 60FPS quite comfortably even with textures held on high, and FXAA added. While drops to 40FPS are possible on each card, in the final count performance shows a clear favour for the 650 Ti Boost's Kepler architecture during shoot-outs.

Water effects appear to give the game the most trouble during jungle battles, and we notice a visible trade-off in alpha animations during an early cut-scene with Psycho. This results in a lowered frame-rate on smoke effects as explosions fire off in the distance. Even so, the 650 Ti Boost acquits itself nicely here, while the lowest settings remove all hiccups from play entirely. It's surprising to find that the original 650 Ti holds up at this medium level too with its 1GB of lower-bandwidth GDDR5. Though it can't come close to performance of Nvidia's latest card, Crysis 3 still flows at above 30FPS on this setting. Put a frame-limit cap in place and even this 99 offering still provides a really decent experience that easily outstrips current-gen console.

Though Crytek's new shooter ranks among the most demanding games on our test palette at the moment, DICE's Battlefield 3 still gives each card a good run for its money. The high graphical preset is within reach for this one, which by default is coupled with post-process AA, screen-space ambient occlusion and motion blur effects. The parking lot shoot-out on the Operation Swordbreaker stage may lack the grander scale environments promised in Battlefield 4's Fishing in Baku trailer, but it does a good job of highlighting what we can expect in performance terms from the updated Frostbite Engine 3 once the game launches this year.

Destruction physics and DirectX 11 effects come as standard in this package,We have a wide selection of handsfreeaccess to choose from for your storage needs. giving the 7850 and original 650 Ti difficulties holding on to a solid 60FPS. However, the 650 Ti Boost Edition, comes closer to the performance standards of the 660, with much of the game on high settings flat-lining at the top of our graphs. To distinguish the two a little better, we run Battlefield 3, Crysis 2 and The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim at maximum settings instead, which in Battlefield's case means rolling out 4x MSAA. The results are illuminating: the 650 Ti Boost trails behind the 660 at every turn, often by a matter of 10FPS in Crysis 2, and with a difference of up to 8FPS for the likes Battlefield 3 and Skyrim.

The contrast in performance between the 650 Ti Boost and 660 is staggering given the current 10 divide between the two cards. For the money, the 20 per cent drop in stream processors on the Boost has a clear impact on compute tasks for more complex games. Though a compromise is clearly possible on lower settings, these results do reflect how the Boost version copes once more next-generation titles translate to PC in the future, and how the 660 will adapt with greater ease.