MSI N650 PE 1GD5 Pro Reviews

The MSI GeForce GTX 650 Power Edition OC is actually a pretty decent card. It’s already possibly a value option next to the 7770, and this MSI version has several upgrades that seem to make it that bit more fearsome. Add good overclocking and the incredible power efficiency, and the 650 is an appetising buy at around the £90 mark.

The MSI GTX 650 Power Edition OC did great in all of the testing. It ran perfectly stable and had some of the best temperatures and power consumption numbers around. Hardcore gamers won't be interested in this level of performance but those on a budget should be if the price is right. MSI Afterburner was fully compatible with the card and allowed for some good overclocking. Fan noise wasn't noticeable when it was left on automatic, and full load noise wasn't bad. The innovative heat sink shroud is a great idea that works well and makes the card more one-size-fits-all universal. With the low power consumption and temperatures this would do well in a variety of scenarios: HTPCs, budget gaming/media computers, and so on. It would be nice to see some low-profile models come out.

NVIDIA's new GTX 650 does not offer anywhere near the gaming potential that we've seen from the faster GK104 or GK106 based cards. It is clearly targeted at entry-level users which may or may not play games at all. In our testing we see performance similar to the last generation GTX 550 Ti. Compared to AMD's HD 7750, the card is a bit faster, but ends up quite a bit behind the HD 7770. MSI has overclocked their card out of the box which gives it a 4% performance boost. Gaming performance lacks in most titles for any serious gaming, but less demanding games like StarCraft 2 or Diablo 3 will run fine on the GTX 650 Power consumption is almost twice as good as on the last-generation Kepler cards from NVIDIA. MSI did a good job engineering their custom board for reduced power consumption. In our testing we see impressive results in both idle and gaming. With just 6-8 W power consumed in any non-gaming state, which includes media playback, so the card might be an option for users who spend a lot of time with productivity and not gaming. The power consumption savings could add up over time to justify the price. In gaming we see great performance per Watt too, which earns the card the title most efficient card ever tested. Thanks to a new display output logic module you can now use three cards at the same time, which is not relevant for gaming, because the card is too slow, but for office systems the ability to run three screens might be useful.