MSI GTX 650Ti Boost Video Card Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Conclusion
When searching for a new video card enthusiasts are often presented with a wide variety of things to factor into their decision from overall performance and price to which cooling method matches my style of gaming and overclocking. If you look at the GTX 650Ti Boost product offerings 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 MSI N650Ti Boost. 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. These things really help to extend the life of these low-end products especially when you consider that adding a second card will almost guarantee a 2X boost in performance across the board.
Overclocking is a big part of the enthusiast community so we tend to look for special card designs that help us overclock without having to resort to extensive board modifications or insane cooling solutions. The MSI GTX 650 Ti Boost might not be a good solution for overclockers but would be a good solution for mainstream gamers with limited screen resolution. There are allowances for custom heatsinks along with plenty of space around the GPU for watercooling. 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 but, we did get lucky and were able to run the card stable at 1153Mhz without any issues.
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. These things really help to extend the life of these low-end products especially when you consider that adding a second card will almost guarantee a 2X boost in performance across the board.
Overclocking is a big part of the enthusiast community so we tend to look for special card designs that help us overclock without having to resort to extensive board modifications or insane cooling solutions. The MSI GTX 650 Ti Boost might not be a good solution for overclockers but would be a good solution for mainstream gamers with limited screen resolution. There are allowances for custom heatsinks along with plenty of space around the GPU for watercooling. 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 but, we did get lucky and were able to run the card stable at 1153Mhz without any issues.
Good Things
Twin Frozr III Cooler
Custom PCB Design
Factory Overclocked
Cool and Quiet Operation
SLI Support
Boost Clock is Back
Custom PCB Design
Factory Overclocked
Cool and Quiet Operation
SLI Support
Boost Clock is Back
Bad Things
No fancy LED lights
Fans are quite loud under manual control
Fans are quite loud under manual control
Ninjalane Rating
MSI GTX 650Ti Boost Video Card Review
Furious 5 of 5
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