Introduction

The ASUS ROG STRIX GeForce GTX 1650 Super is the company's premium GTX 1650 Super offering. Launched late November, the GTX 1650 Super is positioned by NVIDIA at $160 as the the company's entry-level offering of the time, the GTX 1650 lost competitiveness to AMD's new Radeon RX 5500. The ROG STRIX GTX 1650 Super is being launched at $200.



The GeForce GTX 1650 Super, unlike the original GTX 1650, is based on the larger "TU116" silicon. This is because NVIDIA bolstered the GTX 1650 Super not just with new GDDR6 memory, but also increased its CUDA core count by a massive 42 percent (from 896 to 1,280), and the smaller "TU117" physically only has 1,024. Other key specs of the GTX 1650 Super include 80 TMUs and 32 ROPs.

The memory bus of the GTX 1650 Super is 128-bit wide, but thanks to 12 Gbps GDDR6 memory, yields 192 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The GeForce 16-series GPUs lack hardware-accelerated ray-tracing, or AI acceleration, but you still get NVIDIA's latest "Turing" CUDA cores, which are capable of concurrent INT+FP compute and variable-rate shading, features many new games are leveraging.

In this review, we take the ASUS ROG STRIX GeForce GTX 1650 Super for a spin. For the $40 premium over the $160 MSRP, you get a noise-optimized DirectCU II cooling solution featuring ASUS's innovative Axial-Tech fans, which feature a barrier ring along the periphery of the fan that guides all the fan's airflow on to the heatsink. The heatsink is a proper aluminium fin-stack with a pair of heat pipes making direct contact with the GPU. You also get a large overclock out of the box, to a rated boost of 1785 MHz, a metal backplate, an illuminated red ROG logo, dual BIOS, and a 4-pin case fan header to sync one of your case fans to the graphics card,