Galaxy GeForce GTX 650 GC Review

Nvidia launched the GTX 650 alongside the GTX 660, which is targeted more towards the budget/mainstream crowd. The card is actually based on the same GT 640 silicon but with higher clock speeds and GDDR5 memory for added oomph. Today we have Galaxy’s offering, a company known for whacky graphics card designs. Let’s see how Nvidia’s latest changes the mainstream GPU segment. 

Design and Build
Galaxy has gone with Nvidia’s reference PCB but almost everything else is their own custom design. The reference design only occupies a single slot but Galaxy’s custom cooler will take two slots in your system. The card is still very compact and will easily fit in almost any mid-tower chassis. The entire PCB is covered by this massive cooler which is made up mostly of aluminium fins and a large fan in the center to cool the card. Galaxy has also added a hinge for the outer plastic shell of the cooler so you can easily open it and clean the dust off the card - a very thoughtful addition.

Well built cooler

The rear ports include two dual-link DVI-I connectors and a miniHDMI connector. The box includes a DVI to VGA adapter and a PCIe to Molex power adapter, however we would have liked to see a miniHDMI to HDMI adapter as well. There are a bunch of vents placed beside the ports as well to vent some of the hot air outside the case. The Galaxy GTX 650 does require a 6-pin PCIe power connector but the overall power consumption is still 64W, about the same as the GT 640. Nvidia recommends a 400W PSU as a bare minimum to run this card.

Good set of connectors

Features
Galaxy’s offering comes factory overclocked so the core runs at a faster 1111MHz while the memory runs at the stock speed of 1250MHz (5000MHz effective). The GTX 650 also comes with 1GB of GDDR5 memory unlike the DDR3 memory used in the GT 640. The rest of the specifications are pretty much identical to the GT 640 like 384 CUDA cores or shaders, 128-bit memory bus, 16 ROPs, etc.

Easy cleaning solution

Despite having very similar specifications, the GTX 650 should get a considerable boost in performance from the faster memory alone. Some key features that haven’t made the cut in the GTX 650 is GPU Boost and FXAA. The rest of the features like Adaptive VSync and 3DVision Surround are present however along with the usual PhysX support.

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: Galaxy GeForce GTX 650
• PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro 1000W
• OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit