Gigabyte GTX 650 Ti Boost Video Card Review

When searching for a new video card enthusiasts are often presented with a wide variety of things to contend with from overall performance and price to which cooling method matches my style of gaming and overclocking.  If you look at all of the GTX 650Ti Boost products you have two basic choices.  You can either go with a reference designed card as released by NVidia or select one of the hot-clocked editions like the Gigabyte GV-N65TBOC-2GD.  Of course the second of these promises higher performance with a great price point for gamers.

In our initial review of the GTX 650 Ti we concluded that it wasn't really a card for the hardware enthusiast but worked very well on all platforms as a dedicated PhysX processor.  It would seem our position has changed with the GTX 650 Ti Boost given that the Kepler Boost Clock is back along with support for 2-way SLI.  Both of these really help to extend the life of the video card especially when you consider that adding a second card will almost guarantee a 2X boost in performance.

Sadly, our card wasn't a very good overclocker but we were extremely pleased with the layout of the custom Windforce heatsink.  Not only is the cooler extremely quiet but it features four extremely large heatpipes, large cold plate over the GPU and allocations for PWM cooling.  These cooling benefits extend beyond overclocking performance into the realm of the "real world".  For instance given that many mainstream chassis designs are inherently bad at keeping your system cool it is important that the various heatsinks in your system do.  Large capacity coolers like the Gigabyte Windforce will help ensure that your video card survives long gaming sessions even if you don't.

The factory overclock is a nice perk and we would strongly suggest that if this card is in your price range be sure to get the overclocked edition.  Sadly no direct voltage controls so overclocking will be limited from the start but, we did get lucky and were able to run the card stable at 1100Mhz without any issues but, would have liked to have gotten more.

High Capacity Windforce Cooler
Cool Blue PCB
Factory Overclocked
Cool and Quiet Operation
SLI Support
Boost Clock is Back

No fancy LED lights
Would have liked a faster factory clock