NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Review: Bringing Balance To The Force
by Ryan Smith on March 26, 2013 8:00 AM ESTThe Test
Since the reference GTX 650 Ti Boost is completely identical in build to the reference GTX 660, let’s jump right into our tests.
NVIDIA’s launch drivers for the GTX 650 Ti Boost are the recently released 314.21 driver set, which as an aside we’ve discovered fix Titan’s OpenCL issues and we’ll be following up on that next month. Meanwhile for the rest of our cards we’ll be reusing our data from last week’s 7790 launch, so 314.21 for the other NVIDIA cards, AMD driver 12.101.2 for the 7790, and Catalyst 13.2 B7 for the rest of the AMD cards.
Please note that the GTX 650 Ti Boost NVIDIA is sampling is the 2GB card. We’ll take a look at 1GB cards later once those arrive, since they were a late addition.
On a side note, by the time you’re reading this, this will be the third major GPU article we’ve posted in as many business days, and we still have one more to go tomorrow. So we apologize in advance for not having had the time to run any additional NVIDIA cards besides the 600 series; we’ll get that caught up in Bench once this batch of launches and conferences is over.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Monitor: | Samsung 305T |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 7850 (2GB) AMD Radeon HD 7790 AMD Radeon HD 7770 AMD Radeon HD 6870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost (2GB) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 314.21 AMD 12.101.2 7790 Press Beta AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta 7 |
| OS: | Windows 8 Pro |
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Hrel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
More realistically, price the GTX660 at MOST 180. I can find 7850's for 160, from XFX no less.Anandtech, please add an "edit" function to you comments. Also, I want an email when someone responds to me. Then to be able to click a link that takes me directly to that comment, instead of having to plow through 100's of comments.
CiccioB - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
nvidia prices its solutions at the price it think they are best. If GTX660 sells like cookies, why on earth should they lower the price? To have a red quarter like AMD?And possibly they have quite a few GK106 with just some shaders dead but the memory controller completely working. So those pieces would have to be sold at GTX650 Ti price. With this move they can sell them with a bit of premium price.
Consider that for nvidia this new board costed zero, while AMD had to forge a new chip, which has a cost.
Hrel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
It'd be nice to Just Cause 2 in your benchmarks. It has a built in benchmark and everything. Awesome game people will be playing for years, considering they added multi-player. I know you're still working on the benchmark suite, so this is a suggestion I'd really like to see.Hrel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
nice to see*Holy Batman do you guys need to add an edit function to your comments.
aTonyAtlaw - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
I would posit that perhaps you need to proofread your comments more than Anandtech needs to provide an edit function.skiboysteve - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
its good to keep in mind that open air coolers can be very loud if you dont have a well ventilated case like me. I have a 6850 with an open air cooler and the thing is VERY loud because it gets so crazy hot inside my case. If I had a blower on it, it wouldn't be nearly as loudmarc1000 - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
where is Starcraft II ? it's no longer part of the test suite?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Yes, it was removed. It gets rather silly on high-end cards these days, which is what we base our benchmark selections on.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
How about Skyrim with the high resolution textures? I've heard that that requires 2 GB to run decently. That would be nice to see tested when the silly 1 GB card is released.warezme - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
I think it would be interesting to also post mobile GPU numbers along with these cards. In this field of models there is some relevance related to how the two types would perform in similar games as a comparison.