MSI N650 Ti PE 1GD5 Pro Reviews

Functionally, the MSI GTX N650Ti Power Edition didn't really do it for me. Of course, a lot of that isn't MSI's fault, but I was still disappointed. The price seems right, but you can't buy another card and combine them in SLI. Also, even though the 650Ti is built on the GK104 just like the GTX 660, you don't get any GPU boost with the GTX 650Ti. MSI does a good job of helping out by factory overclocking the N650Ti Power Edition to 993MHz, but then they slack off and only put 1GB of DDR5 RAM on it. The overclocking was good, with about a 20% increase on both the RAM and the GPU core clocks. This brought the performance up by an average of almost 12% across all the benchmarks. That's not terrible. And MSI's afterburner, based on the famous Riva Tuner, is extremely easy to use. The problem? All your overclocking means nil if the GPU doesn't think you need it. It will stay at its own clock speed until it deems you worthy. And now for the value of the MSI N650Ti Power Edition video card. Honestly, $159.99 (Newegg) is a good deal for a video card that can beat out the 560Ti with 448 cores. But without the ability to use SLI, or to take advantage of GPU boosting, I'd have to go with the more expensive GTX 660 if I were an intense gamer. If you don't play a lot of graphically intense video games, however, but you want to be able to play them if you get around to it, then you probably shouldn't spend an extra $60 on a GTX 660 because the GTX 650Ti will suite you just fine.

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 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, even though 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. MSI has overclocked their card out of the box , which gives it a 4% performance boost - not as much as I had hoped for. It would have helped performance if NVIDIA had included their GPU Boost technology, or MSI had overclocked the memory.

The MSI GeForce GTX 650 Ti is a good card for its market. It may not have the capacity to play all games at the highest settings, but remember that this card was not made for that. As a mid-range gaming card, it definitely fulfills its potential and more, in terms of performance. The card even gets close to 25FPS in Metro 2033, the most demanding game we have tested to date. The fact that a mid-range card has this kind of capacity is great, and MSI’s factory overclock only helps. Its solid construction also gives it a boost, and the overclocking headroom granted by MSI’s use of Military Class III components gives mid-range gamers a little more room to work with when overclocking their hardware. The Cyclone II cooler is also well implemented, cooling the card down significantly at a quiet operation. Additionally, the card only comes with only three display outputs, though the GTX 650 Ti GPU has the ability to support four. The reference design also has three outputs, but we feel MSI might have added a fourth just to sweeten the deal a little. The ultimate choice is up to you as the end-user, but we see no reason not to recommend this card as a potential GPU for the mid-range gamer, especially considering performance at value