650 Ti Boost Review - 1080p Performance
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,522 words · ~7 min read
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this video is brought to you by CM Storm Preferred Choice of mice headsets and
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mechanical keyboards of curse gaming visit www. coolermaster usa.com teamor
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curse for more details welcome to the lonus tech tips video review of the GTX
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650ti uh Booster Juice Ed boost Edition
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excuse me boost Edition so I actually think that this shouldn't even be called
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the GTX 650 TI because it is completely
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different from the other one these similarities basically end at the fact
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that they both use PCI Express 3.0 ports
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they both need one PCI Express six pin
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power connector and they both support like DVI monitors because that is pretty
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much it the 650ti boost reference card
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has a slightly longer PCB than the regular 650 TI you can see that right
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there it also has the extension on here
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for the exhaust fan so you can see it's using a much more similar style to the
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other GTX 600 series cards with a rear exhaust that takes the heat out of your
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case away from all the other components it also by reference according to the
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reference design supports 3+ One display outputs whereas only non-reference GTX
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650 TI supported that so you've got two
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dvis an HDMI and a DisplayPort whereas this guy's only got two DVI and a mini
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HDMI the cooler is much beefier it does
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have an SLI finger so you can support two-way SLI on this card and the regular
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650 TI could not it has a 192bit memory
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bus compared to only 128 it is clocked at 6 GHz on the memory and it has a 980
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MHz core frequency versus only 925 on
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this card but the real trick is the fact
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that it supports GPU boost so it will achieve a typical GPU boost of over 1
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GHz around 1033 which makes it
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significantly faster than this card but it also comes in at a significantly
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higher price so it's targeting around 169 for the 2 gig model that's another
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difference this is a 1 gig card natively but there will be a 1 gig model
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following that's about $20 cheaper so
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this is supposed to slot in in between
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something like a 7770 or a 7790 we don't
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have a 7790 yet but we'll be testing that soon and a 7850 in terms of price
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point so we're going to have a look at how performance shakes down pretty soon
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in terms of the physical size of it the reference card is 9 1/2 in long so you
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shouldn't have any trouble fitting it in any kind of gaming oriented case
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although it is not a small form factor Builder's dream like the regular 650 TI
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which is only about 6 in long so that extra 3 in does make all the difference
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in the world without further Ado we're going to move into our performance
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numbers starting with Far Cry Oh no test bench test bench so we're running our
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3960x at 4 gigz with 6 16 gigs of hyperx
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RAM all the cards we ran we ran the 650 TI the 650 TI boost the 660 the 7770 the
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7850 and the 7870 these are the cards uh
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at at and around that same price point we used the vertex 4128 gig for our SSD
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we have a an anch high current Pro
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Platinum 1000 watt and we're using a P9 x79 Deluxe motherboard from ASUS now as
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always all of our cards are overclocked if you want to see overclocking settings
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you can check them out in the link in the video description you can see what
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we're running at we're aiming for overclocks that you guys can easily
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achieve with your cards at home so we're not pushing them to the absolute limit
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in terms of drivers we're using the latest NVIDIA drivers so we have an unreleased driver for the NVIDIA cards
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and we have AMD's 13.1 driver because uh
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obviously we don't have an unreleased driver for the AMD cards because they're
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all the ones we're testing are released so let's start with Far Cry 3 here we
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see the 7870 and the 7850 topping the charts with the 660 coming in a little
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bit below the 7850 pretty much the same it's within margin of error and then the
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650ti Boost actually putting up a really
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good showing and this backs up what I was saying about the 650 TI boost really
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not actually being a 650 TI at all it is
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closer to a 660 in terms of performance than it is to a 650 TI both the 650 TI
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and the 7770 dropped enormously in terms of the
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minimum frame rates in this game demonstrating that 1 gig of video memory
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is not enough for modern gaming at 1080p
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so I would only really suggest playing Far Cry 3 on either of those two cards
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on a 1680 by 1050 monitor or lower in
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Crisis 3 we see the same story except that the GTX 660 which is on the test
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bench right now here wins this one but again within margin of error against the
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7870 the 7850 put up a really good sh
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only performing 10% worse than the 7870 with the 650 TI boost less than 10% away
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from the 7850 in spite of the price
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differential the 650 TI again just
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choked in this game compared to the 650 TI boost performing about
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65% as well as the 650 TI boost so you
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are getting a lot of extra performance for that extra 40 bucks the 787 oh and
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the Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim we are running our sort of modded game with
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about 18 mods so your performance may
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vary in this game however we will be producing a benchmarking guide for this
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game pretty soon so stay tuned for that our 7870 and 7850 did top the charts in
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this one with our 660 and our 650ti
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boost coming very close to each other only about 5% away from each other in
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terms of performance with the 650ti and the 7770 bringing up the rear once again
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as the less expensive cards this does make sense um in The Witcher 2 we're
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running with Uber sampling and anti-aliasing disabled and the radon
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cards do come out ahead bearing in mind of course that they are more expensive
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with the 660 uh only leading the 650 TI
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boost by about 10% and then the 7770 and
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the 650 TI again bringing up the rear we're seeing uh some pretty good
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consistency to the results here which uh means that NVIDIA has done a good job of
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pricing the 650 TI boost um correctly
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according to the rest of the market Market the 2 gigs of RAM to me is a huge
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selling point compared to the recently released 7790 although we haven't tested
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it yet so uh bear that in mind we will have a review of that coming soon and
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we're going to include these numbers in there as well so in Metro 2033 the 7870
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comes out on top followed by the 660 uh which is in a very tight pack with the
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7850 and the 650 TI boost it's actually
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pretty good to see how close the 650 TI
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boost gets to the 7850 considering that there is a price differential there
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making this one of the most cost effective 2 gig cards and actually
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suitable for 1080p gaming because again in Metro 23 both our 7770 and our 650 TI
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which are our 1 gig cards put up pretty decent average frame rates and maximum
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frame rates but their minimum frame rates were less than half of the average
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frame rates meaning they ran out of video memory buffer at some point during
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our testing and absolutely choked in terms of performance so while this is a
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review of the 650 TI boost I am looking at it as almost more of an examination
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of how much memory we actually need for modern gaming so the two games Far Cry 3
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and Metro 2033 that really choked on the one gig cards demonstrate that 2 gigs is
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what we need for 1080p gaming however just because the card supports 3+ one in
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NVIDIA surround with an auxiliary display doesn't mean you're going to be
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playing any AAA current gen title
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at 3x 1080p resolution you want to do something like that you got to step up
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to a bigger card it's nice to see those features from a productivity standpoint
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on the card but you know guys make sure
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your expectations are realistic thank you for checking out this video review
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of the 650 TI boost from NVIDIA don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for
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