The EVGA GeForce GTX 1650 Super SC Ultra is a premium-looking custom-design that comes at MSRP pricing, which makes it one of the most interesting options in today's lower-midrange gaming market. For just $160 you get enough performance to play all games at high settings and Full HD 1080p. EVGA even included a factory overclock with the SC Ultra, something other companies charge you a few extra bucks for. Averaged over our test suite, at 1080p, we measured a 2% performance improvement over the GTX 1650 Super reference—not a whole lot, but other custom designs aren't giving you much more either. Compared to the plain GTX 1650, the EVGA GTX 1650 Super is 37% faster, a huge difference. AMD's recently released RX 5500 is 7% faster. Some leaks are reporting that the RX 5500 XT is just the RX 5500 with the same shader count and higher clocks, so the XT should be comparable to EVGA's card in performance. The AMD RX 590 is 5% faster than the GTX 1650 Super, and the GTX 1660 is 11% faster at substantially higher pricing. Overall, we can easily recommend the GTX 1650 Super as a great choice for gaming at Full HD 1080p in all titles.

While some other manufacturers put terrible coolers on their MSRP cards that are just enough to keep the card from overheating, EVGA's SC Ultra actually has a very decent thermal solution that handles GPU heat output very well, reaching just 64°C, which is very low, especially for a card at such a competitive price point. However, noise levels are not good—we measured 38 dBA, which is noisier than most of the competition, and that could turn into a deal breaker for some. It seems EVGA wanted to impress with low temperatures. While I understand that some customers are fixated on temperatures because they are easy to measure, quantify, and compare, a better balance between noise levels and temperatures would significantly improve the product. Whether the GPU temperature is 67°C or 74°C, for example, has negligible impact on anything other than the number in monitoring software. Lower noise levels, on the other hand, affect gamers every single minute they are gaming. People are becoming more and more noise-aware; the tremendous success of MSI graphics cards over the last years is testament to that. Looking at AMD's recent Radeon RX 5700 XT launch, PowerColor released the Red Devil, which is the quietest Navi card and one of the quietest AMD cards we have ever tested—that card has been flying off the shelves, getting recommendations everywhere, both from the press and users. Reducing fan speeds is of course possible on the GTX 1650 Super SC Ultra, but it's an additional manual step that might even be too complicated for many novice users. Where EVGA's card scores big is idle noise levels, which are perfect because the company includes the idle-fan-stop feature on this MSRP card, which is a rare sight. Thanks to that capability, users can enjoy a perfectly noise-free graphics card during desktop work, Internet browsing, media playback, and light gaming.

During disassembly, I noticed that EVGA uses very thick thermals pads on the memory. That is definitely not an ideal cooling configuration, but it seems they use this arrangement to provide additional stability for the cooler, which is mounted using four screws only. This approach certainly reduces heat transfer between the memory chips and the cooler, but it's not as bad as you might think. A significant percentage of heat travels through the solder balls on the bottom of the memory chips and into the PCB, where it gets picked up by the main cooler sitting right on top of the GPU. Now, that of course results in additional heat for the chip, which increases its temperatures slightly, but we still measured good GPU temperatures, so that is not an issue. Memory temperatures are higher, too, but the card was perfectly stable in all our testing and actually had the best overclocking potential of all GTX 1650 Super cards we've tested so far—by quite a big margin, so cooling can't be that problematic.

Overclocking worked extremely well, and we achieved a 16% real-life performance gain, which is very impressive and brings the card close to GTX 1660 levels. The fact that this card is priced at MSRP is worth highlighting here again, most people assume that GPU vendors bin their cards and reserve the best overclockers for their higher-priced "OC" models. Apparently, this isn't the case with the EVGA GTX 1650 Super Series, or we were extremely lucky in the silicon lottery.

What could have played a role, too, is that the card is able to peak at higher power levels than expected. According to the BIOS, EVGA did not increase their card's power limit beyond the reference design setting of 100 W. Increasing the power limit yields additional performance because NVIDIA's GPU Boost algorithm has additional power to work with, so higher clocks can be sustained for longer. We measured up to 137 W in Furmark, which is clearly much higher than the 100 W listed in the BIOS configuration, and it's also higher than what we saw in other GTX 1650 Super reviews. This could be the reason why overclocking worked so well, as normally, the card would run into its power limit, so dialing in specific OC frequencies is difficult because Boost messes with the clocks. If the card runs unconstrained, higher frequencies are possible. Comparing my power measurements with the card's own sensors, which are usually quite accurate on NVIDIA cards, reveals that the power limiting circuitry doesn't "see" quite a lot of power running through the card. When I measured 130 W, the power sensor reported 100 W. I uploaded the BIOS here should you want to peek around in it.

Video memory size of 4 GB might sound low at first, but you have to consider that pricing matters a lot in this segment. Adding more memory would make the card more expensive with little or no performance difference at 1080p Full HD. Looking at our performance numbers, we can definitely see reduced FPS at 4K resolution compared to cards with more memory, but I'm not seeing anything in our data that would suggest these cards are memory-bound at 1080p. We're running maximum details, including optional HD texture packs when available, so there are lots of options to reduce memory requirements should it come to that. I rather buy a more affordable card now than waste money on future-proofing, at least in this segment.

NVIDIA has positioned their new GTX 1650 Super very aggressively. With an MSRP of $160, the card is priced similarly to AMD's aging Radeon RX 580, yet offers better performance, noise, and thermals. The Radeon RX 590 is $190 at the moment, down from its launch price of $280—I'd rather buy the GTX 1650 Super. AMD has announced the Radeon RX 5500 a while ago, and the XT variant for the DIY market is supposed to launch soon, but nobody knows its pricing. EVGA's GTX 1650 Super SC Ultra retails at $160, which means there is no price increase for the better cooler, idle fan stop, factory overclock, and backplate. If you are looking for a GTX 1650 Super, the EVGA card should definitely be on top of your list if you can live with the noisy fans. I guess it's good for other vendors that EVGA failed here because with a balanced fan profile, the card would be the one GTX 1650 Super to buy, better than any alternative I could imagine.