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 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 ASUS had overclocked the memory. Compared to MSI's GTX 650 Ti Power Edition, the ASUS card is clocked a bit higher, which translates into a 1% performance difference - nothing to write home about.
Power consumption of the card in all states is phenomenally low. The card requires much less power in non-gaming states than anything AMD has to offer. During gaming, performance per watt is great too; that is, a bit better than AMD, but the difference is relatively small.
The low power consumption also affects heat output and fan noise. We see outstanding noise levels from the DC II TOP – temperatures are also low in both idle and load. The card will essentially be inaudible in a contemporary system that has fans for CPU cooling and case ventilation.
GPU Overclocking works reasonably well, but memory overclocks are much worse than the MSI card we have tested today, which is quite surprising because the memory should be able to run higher clocks.
Price-wise, NVIDIA is asking $150. We expect a price of $165 for the custom, overlocked ASUS DC II. Overall, such pricing is not unreasonable, but not good enough to compete with other cards in its price range. For example, the aging HD 6950 can be had for $170 (20% faster), and $185 will get you a HD 7850 2 GB that is about 30% faster. Another interesting option is the 1 GB HD 7850. It can be had for extremely competitive $165 and provides the same exact performance as the 2 GB version in all realistic tests. On the other hand, the GTX 650 Ti comes with better power and noise than most other cards you can find on the market today.