ZOTAC GeForce GTX 650 Ti AMP! Edition Pro Reviews

With every launch of a GeForce 600 series card NVIDIA has had a specific market target in mind. Typically those targets intersect or undercut an AMD market, and while AMD has not been caught off-guard with subsequent launches like they were the launch of the GTX 680, NVIDIA has so far managed to stay on equal or better footing as AMD. Or at least that was the case until today with the launch of the GeForce GTX 650 Ti. To be clear, the GeForce GTX 650 Ti as it’s configured does not have a direct competitor, and this is something NVIDIA specifically planned for. At $149 it’s squeezed in between the Radeon HD 7770 and the Radeon HD 7850, which happens to be a rather wide performance gap. Under normal circumstances this would be a very good plan, as it means NVIDIA can tap a market segment that AMD wasn’t adequately serving before, while at the same time direct avoiding competition with AMD. But such a plan relies on AMD not making an aggressive move in return.

Overall though, the GeForce GTX 650 Ti is an interesting product. It may not be the highest performing solution throughout its entire price range, but the card’s small form factor, friendly power consumption characteristics, and cool and quiet operation are all pluses in our book.

NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 650 Ti offers much better performance than the normal GTX 650. The GTX 650 uses GK107 silicon, whereas the GTX 650 Ti uses GK106 silicon, which is also used on the GTX 660. This change makes the card 30% faster than the GTX 650, which is still much slower than the GTX 660. Overall, we see decent performance for 1680x1050 gaming; full HD 1080p gaming is asking a bit too much from the card, although it should be able to handle HD 1080p gaming at lower details settings. Compared to AMD's offerings, the card sits right between the HD 7770 and HD 7850. ZOTAC's AMP! Edition comes with a large overclock on both GPU and memory; other GTX 650 Tis had no memory overclock. Overclocking the memory helped the card gain a nice performance boost because the GTX 650 Ti is relatively bandwidth limited. ZOTAC also doubled the memory size of their card to 2 GB, which can barely make a difference. Its extra memory size only causes improvements with a few games, like Battlefield 3 and Skyrim, at 2560x1600: a resolution that's clearly impractical for the GTX 650 Ti because overall performance is just not fast enough.

At fairly conservative settings, the GK106-equipped GTX 650 Ti nearly overtakes Nvidia's GeForce GTX 560 and Radeon HD 6870. But when MSAA is applied at higher quality levels, the board takes a disproportionately large hit, ending up a few percentage points faster than the Radeon HD 6850, on average. As we saw in the benchmarks, that disparity can be mitigated somewhat through overclocking. In addition, most newer titles support alternative anti-aliasing modes, such as FXAA, that are easier on bandwidth-starved board designs. Assuming it surfaces at the $150 target Nvidia tells us to expect, the GeForce GTX 650 Ti offers the best performance at its price point, with average frame rates that outclass the Radeon HD 6850. The Radeon HD 7770 is beaten even more soundly. Conservative power, heat, and noise measurements make the card easy to live with and build an entry-level gaming system around, too