NVIDIA's new GTX 650 does not offer anywhere near the gaming potential that we've seen from the faster GK104 or GK106 based cards. It is clearly targeted at entry-level users who may or may not play games at all. In our testing, we see performance similar to the last generation GTX 550 Ti. Compared to AMD's HD 7750, the card is a bit faster, but ends up quite a bit behind the HD 7770. KFA² has overclocked their card out of the box, which gives it a 4% performance boost. Gaming performance is lacking in most titles for any serious gaming to take place, but less demanding games like StarCraft 2 or Diablo 3 will run fine on the GTX 650.
Power consumption is much better than the last-generation cards from NVIDIA, and roughly on par with AMD's latest offerings. You can now use three cards at the same time due to a new display output logic module, which is irrelevant for gaming because the card is too slow, but, perhaps, useful for office systems with the ability to run three screens at the same time.
KFA² has put an interesting fan cleaning mechanism on the card that is simple but works fine. Fan noise is not that great. The card is noisy for its performance class. It seems like KFA² did not update the BIOS fan profile to match the capabilities of the fan. Temperatures are super low due to a high fan speed, but this offers no tangible benefits to the user - a quieter fan would be better.
Price-wise, the KFA² GTX 650 EX OC comes at NVIDIA's reference design price, which is nice given the custom cooler and small overclock out of the box. However, the GTX 650 reference design price is too high to be competitive. A price around the $100 mark would be more realistic given what the card offers. Cards like the HD 7750 and the HD 7770 offer much more bang for the buck. If you are a gamer on a budget, a card you should really consider is the HD 7850 1 GB. It is quite a bit more expensive, but offers almost twice the performance and the best price/performance ratio, thanks to a reduced memory footprint of 1 GB that doesn't affect games negatively, but helps a lot with the price. Other options might be a used GTX 560 Ti or HD 6850/70.