MSI GEFORCE GTX 650 1GB Power Edition Video Card Review

Introduction

These low-end $100 video cards aren't the most exciting to look at, but no one can deny the importance of them as we know not everyone games at 2560 x 1600, runs AA and AF and doesn't want to spend over $400. So with that said it's time to check out the new lower end NVIDIA GEFORCE model, the GTX 650.

The particular model we're looking at today comes in the form of the GTX 650 Power Edition and anyone who knows the Power Edition series of course knows it belongs to one of our favorite video card manufacturers, MSI.

As always we've got a few things to do before we look at the performance of the new model and we'll be starting off with the box and package. Then we'll look at the video card itself before checking out the specifications of the new NVIDIA model and see what exactly MSI are offering with the Power Edition version we've got today.

Then we'll quickly look at our testbed and the cards we'll be also including in our graphs today before getting into the performance side of things and finding out just what kind of performance this new model gives us. As we just mentioned, though, let's see what's going on with the package of the new model.

Package

Looking at the front of the box we don't really see anything that we haven't seen before with the typical Power Edition design going on. Opening up the box we can see that we start to see some of the main features that are offered with the Power Edition model. The first is the Triple Over-Voltage feature under Afterburner, higher quality components in the form of Hi-c CAP, SFC and Solid CAP along with an Enhanced PWM Design.

Moving to the bottom of the inside we get a little look at the card and we get a good description on what exactly is going on with the TransThermal Design which is one of the main features that is offered with this card. We also see what's going on with the cooler setup which we'll look at on the next page. Turning to the back we get a bit more technical on the model itself along with some other basic information.

Moving inside the box we've got the normal paperwork, driver CD, dual Molex to 6-pin PCIe power connector, DVI to VGA connector and a mini HDMI to HDMI convertor. Along with that you can see we've also got an extra fan which we kind of saw above as we looked inside the box. We'll take the time to have a closer look at it on the next page, though, to see exactly how it works.