MSI GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2GB Boost Twin Frozr Gaming Overclocked Video Card Review

Introduction

It seems for at least the next few weeks the large focus on the video card market is going to be the new mid-range offerings from both AMD and NVIDIA that hit at around the $150 mark, which is definitely a key price point for companies, as it's an area where most the sales happen.

We've already looked at a lot number of retail options from both sides of the fence including the ASUS, GIGABYTE and Sapphire on the AMD Radeon HD 7790 side. As for the NVIDIA options, we've seen the Palit along with the Gainward GTX 650 Ti Boost, which we ran in SLI and overclocked.

Both models have impressed us so far and while the NVIDIA GTX 650 Ti Boost offering tends to be a little faster, it's also a little more expensive, due to the 2GB of GDDR5 included, instead of the 1GB seen on the AMD HD 7790. Today we're back looking at the GTX 650 Ti Boost which comes from MSI.

The new MSI GTX 650 Ti 2GB Boost Twin Frozr Gaming video card is the first to come in as part of the new "Gaming" series name we're seeing from MSI, which saw the launch of new motherboards under the name, too. It will be nice to see some unity between the motherboard and video card area as MSI no doubt hope to further this new "Gaming" series brand in the coming months.

While we'll be looking at one of the new MSI Gaming Series motherboards in the coming weeks, today is all about the MSI GTX 650 Ti 2GB Boost Twin Frozr Gaming video card. As always, the approach will be fairly standard as we take a time to look at the box and the package before moving onto the card itself. Once we've done that we'll then take a look at the specifications along with what we managed to overclock the card to. We'll then look at our test system, talk about the cards that you'll see in our graphs today and get stuck into the performance to see just what we're able to get out of the card.

Package

Looking at the front of the box you can see we've got a new design with the card being part of the new Gaming series from MSI. The black and red looks good and you can see the main information on the front along with mention that it's an OC Edition card in the bottom left. Looking at the back of the box we have some of the main features including MSI Afterburner support along with mention that higher quality components are used. On the right you can see some of the core features of the GPU itself.

Being a mid-range card we didn't expect a lot with the bundle, and you can see we've got just a Quick User Guide, driver CD, DVI to VGA connector and a dual Molex to 6-pin PCIe power connector to round off the bundle.