ASUS GeForce GTX 1650 Super STRIX OC Review

Name: ASUS GeForce GTX 1650 Super STRIX OC
Brand: ASUS

W1zzard

on Dec 11th, 2019,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: ASUS

(11 Comments) »

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,

GeForce GTX 1650 Super Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Shader Units	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
GTX 1050	$135	640	32	1354 MHz	1455 MHz	1752 MHz	GP107	3300M	2 GB, GDDR5, 128-bit
GTX 1050 Ti	$150	768	32	1290 MHz	1392 MHz	1752 MHz	GP107	3300M	4 GB, GDDR5, 128-bit
GTX 1650	$150	896	32	1485 MHz	1665 MHz	2000 MHz	TU117	unknown	4 GB, GDDR5, 128-bit
RX 570	$130	2048	32	1168 MHz	1244 MHz	1750 MHz	Ellesmere	5700M	4 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RX 5500	unknown	1408	32	1717 MHz	1845 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 14	6400M	4 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
GTX 1650 Super	$160	1280	32	1530 MHz	1725 MHz	1500 MHz	TU116	6600M	4 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
ASUS GTX 1650 Super STRIX OC	$200	1280	32	1530 MHz	1785 MHz	1500 MHz	TU116	6600M	4 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RX 580	$180	2304	32	1257 MHz	1340 MHz	2000 MHz	Ellesmere	5700M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
GTX 1060 3 GB	$170	1152	48	1506 MHz	1708 MHz	2002 MHz	GP106	4400M	3 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
GTX 1060	$210	1280	48	1506 MHz	1708 MHz	2002 MHz	GP106	4400M	6 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
RX 590	$195	2304	32	1469 MHz	1545 MHz	2000 MHz	Polaris 30	5700M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
GTX 1660	$210	1408	48	1530 MHz	1785 MHz	2000 MHz	TU116	6600M	6 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
GTX 1070	$300	1920	64	1506 MHz	1683 MHz	2002 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RX Vega 56	$300	3584	64	1156 MHz	1471 MHz	800 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1660 Super	$230	1408	48	1530 MHz	1785 MHz	1750 MHz	TU116	6600M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
GTX 1660 Ti	$275	1536	48	1500 MHz	1770 MHz	1500 MHz	TU116	6600M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
GTX 1070 Ti	$450	2432	64	1607 MHz	1683 MHz	2000 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit

Packaging and Contents

The Card

Visually, the ASUS GTX 1650 Super STRIX OC looks identical to the company's GTX 1660 Super STRIX OC and other similar products. A dual-fan heatsink ensures the card stays cool at all times. Unlike most of the competition, ASUS does include a high-quality metal backplate with their card.

Dimensions of the card are 24.3 cm x 13.0 cm.

Installation requires two slots in your system. The card is a tiny bit thicker than two slots, but that shouldn't be a problem.

Display connectivity options include two DisplayPort 1.4a outputs and two HDMI 2.0b.

NVIDIA has updated their display engine with the Turing microarchitecture, which now supports DisplayPort 1.4a with support for VESA's nearly lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC). Combined, this enables support for 8K@30Hz with a single cable or 8K@60Hz when DSC is turned on. For context, DisplayPort 1.4a is the latest version of the standard that was published in April, 2018.

At CES 2019, NVIDIA announced that all their graphics cards will now support VESA Adaptive Sync (aka FreeSync). While only a small number of FreeSync monitors have been fully qualified with G-SYNC, users can enable the feature in NVIDIA's control panel regardless of whether the monitor is certified or not.

The board uses one 6-pin power connector. This input configuration is specified for up to 150 watts of power draw.

The GeForce GTX 1650 Super does not support SLI. ASUS used the space to position their dual-BIOS switch here, and the large button serves to turn off the illuminated ASUS ROG logo without any software.

You also get a 4-pin PWM fan header to sync your case fans to the graphics card's fans.

Disassembly

The ASUS heatsink uses two heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU surface. Do note the lonely thermal pad sitting at the top edge of the cooler, which provides cooling for two of the memory chips; the other two memory chips are cooled only by the cooler's airflow.

A metal reinforcement brace is installed to improve rigidity of the card.

The backplate is made from metal and has two thermal pads to provide a little bit of extra cooling.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles or forum posts.