GTX 650 MSI GeForce Power Edition Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,545 words · ~7 min read
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welcome to my unboxing and first look at the GeForce GTX 650 this is the power
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Edition from MSI which is actually going to be quite a factor for this particular
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GPU I believe although I haven't tested it yet this is my first time opening up
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the box so I'm pretty excited about that this is an OC Edition as most power
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edition cards are it uses their trans thermal design which I'll show you guys
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once I open it up it's got 1 gig of gddr5 although the 650 will be available
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with 2 gigs as well uses a 128bit bus and the GK 107 GPU so this is a slightly
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lower end GPU than the GK 106 that's used in the GeForce GTX
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660 although the 660ti uses the 104 GPU
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so just sort of try and wrap your brain around all of that so this has most of
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the Kepler features including direct X11 as well as 3D Vision support NVIDIA
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surround their new anti-aliasing technologies adaptive vsync which turns
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your vsync on if you are above your refresh rate of your monitor and off if
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you're below this provides an optimal balance of performance and avoiding
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screen tearing you've got full support for physx Cuda as well as their pure
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video HD technology okay um and up to 3
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plus one displays out so you can
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use let's just open it up shall we let
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get this going did I say 3+1 display is out because what I meant to say is three
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displays so sorry my bad actually give me a
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sec yeah three displays out sorry guys so that's uh with support for NVIDIA
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surround technology that sort of stands for reason but not 3+ 1 so if you want
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3+ one you're going to want to look at one of the higher end cards such as the
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660 or 660 Ti I mean it's kind of stands
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to reason because there's no way you're going to be playing a game in surround
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on sort of a low lower end card like this plus be running an auxiliary
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display it just doesn't necessarily make any sense so let's have a look at what
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we've got in terms of accessories you got a dual Molex to PCIe power adapter
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you've got bunch of stuff in here DVI to VGA adapter ah one of those right angle
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mini HDMI to HDMI adapters these are handy because they keep it from
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interfering with your case all right you've got some documentation that
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doesn't really matter as well as a driver disc but you should download the latest off the NVIDIA website just go
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ahead and close this bad boy up put that
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in there okay now one conspicuous
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absentee from the NVIDIA feature set even though this is a GTX class card is
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SLI okay so if you guys want SLI compatibility you want the ability to
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run a couple cards in tandem in the future you are going to want to go with
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at least a GeForce GTX 660 okay at the
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time of filming although who knows there might be some other GPU coming out later that goes between that might support S I
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don't know anything about that though so let's have a look at the card itself right power Edition what's important
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about that with these kind of mainstream mainstream gaming graphics cards it's
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all about getting the best bang for your buck so you are definitely going to want
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to get the most out of whatever overclocking you're going to do on a
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card like this so what a power Edition card does is it gives you access to
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MSI's additional overvolting options so
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those overvolting options are going to allow you to really squeeze every last
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megahertz until it megahertz out of this card to get as
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much performance as you can full support for PCI Express 3.0 so that's a 16x slot
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and don't worry about the missing pins it's fine we've seen this before on
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NVIDIA lower-end gaming cards and it doesn't actually it doesn't actually
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matter unless you need the extra bandwidth or well not extra bandwidth
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it's still running at PCI e6x unless you need the extra pins you don't end up
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needing the extra pins so the higher end cards have all of them the lower end
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ones sometimes don't let's have a look at the cooler so this is sort of a
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unique design check this out okay so you've got kind of these contact plates
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down here which are split up a little bit okay then you've got thermal
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interface material under them that is uh interacting with things like uh like the
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memory things like vrm all that good stuff and then you've got a very
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open I'm just going to slide this again I'll show you what that does later
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you've got a very open design that allows a lot of air to pass right
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through the card which is going to do a great job of cooling vrm components
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as well as the any memory modules or whatever else the case may be speaking
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of memory modules with the 128bit bus and with the density of memory chips
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these days there are only four memory chips they're on the other side of the card and I suspect because this is a
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custom PCB that they need to redesign the PCB in order to install actually
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hold on those might be contact those might be contact pads for additional
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ones here actually so they probably wouldn't need to a two gig card could be
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done fairly easily with this PCB all right so let's show you guys MSI's
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exclusive trans thermal design so you
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want more silence you leave it in single fan mode this is using a propeller blade
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fan that looks like an like a 92mm fan
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so that's pretty cool uh let's see did they have anything to say for them ah
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yes okay so we we'll use their diagram so there's single fan mode there's
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higher static pressure double airflow mode and then there's actually dual fan
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mode sweet so this provides more cooling for the pwm modules in memory this
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enhances the heat dissipation capacity with pressure which remember you need
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pressure to push air through fins and then you need better and this single fan
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mode is just like quieter and better than reference still so the cooler
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includes their propeller fins as well as their dust removal technology so their
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dust removal technology spins the fan backwards to blow some dust out of the
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heat sink before then turning around and spinning the correct way now this will
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sound kind of loud when you first turn it on every time but bear in mind the
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card is operating correctly correctly and everything is okay so I'm going to
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show you guys how to transform from uh one mode to another one I'm guessing
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they couldn't call it a Transformer because then Apple would claim that they invented Transformers and uh you know
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tell them they can't sell their card in North America anymore or wait no
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couldn't yeah must be apple that's that's the one that invented everything
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so here is the double stack fan
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configuration and uh you can see that they've actually got see these are this
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is kind of a smart fan design actually I wouldn't have minded it if they were counter rotating that would be even
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better but you can see they've got these blades in here that will help it
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generate more pressure without generating as much interference between
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the two fans then you plug this guy right in here and all of a sudden you
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have a triple slot card but MSI is giving you the option to keep it dual
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slot if you don't want to install the additional the additional fan module
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however you have more options than that but wait there's more slide it like
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this pop it in like
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this and
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oh whoops I did that wrong hold on hold on I got this i got
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this there we go there you go dual fan
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cooler so that increases the length of the card a little bit as well so you
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still plug the power in there but you got a little bit more I mean there's going to be a lot of clearance in most
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gaming cases for this kind of a card anyway but uh there you go that's
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showing you both of the additional fan modes so in conclusion that is the 6 GTX
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650 from MSI this is the power Edition with their their trans thermal cooling
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