Asus GTX650TI-DC2T-1GD5 Review

Nvidia is almost done with their Kepler onslaught and the newly launched GTX 650 Ti is one of the final pieces of the puzzle. The card fills the void between the GTX 650 and the GTX 660 and will eventually replace the GTX 560 right now and later on, even the GTX 550 Ti once the price drops. We have Asus’ take on the card with its Direct CU II cooler taking up just two slots this time around, instead of three. Let’s see how it stacks up against the competition.

Design and Build
Asus has gone with its own custom design with the PCB and has also added its DIGI+ VRM technology – that we've already seen on its motherboards – for a cleaner power delivery. The actual card is quite small but seems large due to the custom cooler on the front. Rather than designing a new cooler for the smaller PCB, which would mean an increase in cost, Asus has used the same dual-fan cooler that we’ve seen on higher-end cards like the GTX 680 and HD 7970.

Unnecessarily long?

You can connect up to four monitors with this card thanks to two dual-link DVI-D ports, VGA and HDMI. There are a few vents along the rear bracket as well, although it’s not needed since the cooler has an open design so the hot air escapes in the cabinet itself. The aluminium cooler has a copper base along with copper heatpipes to transfer the heat to the fins, which is then cooled by the two fans. The cooler extends the length of the card quite a bit - to 10 inches - so you’ll need a big cabinet to fit this in comfortably. The maximum power draw of the GTX 650 Ti is just 110W so you only need a single PCIe power connector. Nvidia recommends a 400W PSU as the bare minimum to properly power the card.

Built really well

Features
The GTX 650 Ti is based on the same GK106 silicon used in the GTX 660. The stripped down card now features 768 CUDA cores and a core clock that runs at 928MHz. Asus’ card comes factory overclocked so the core clock now runs at 1033MHz. You also get 2GB of GDDR5 memory that runs at the reference speed of 1350MHz (5400MHz effective). The memory bus is still capped at 128-bit. While there isn’t any GPU Boost, you do get other features of Kepler, like TXAA and FXAA, Adaptive VSync and Nvidia Surround.

Testbench
•    Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz
•    Motherboard: GIGABYTE P67A-UD3R
•    Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws 8GB (4GB x 2) @1600MHz
•    Hard drive: Intel SSD 520 240GB (Boot Drive), WD Velociraptor 300GB (Secondary Drive)
•    GPU: Asus GTX 650 Ti Direct CU II
•    PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro 1000W
•    OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit