The Card

The MSI GTX 1650 Gaming follows the visual theme MSI is using on their other "Turing" based graphics cards. It is 25.0 cm long and 13.5 cm tall. A backplate is not included, which isn't surprising in this market segment.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include two standard-sized DisplayPort 1.4 and a 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.

Since earlier this year, NVIDIA has enabled support for VESA Adaptive Sync (aka FreeSync) on all of their cards. While only a small number of FreeSync monitors have been fully qualified for G-SYNC, users can enable the feature in NVIDIA's control panel regardless of whether the monitor is certified or not.


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


GeForce GTX 1650 does not support SLI.

Disassembly

The MSI cooler uses a single double-length heatpipe to keep the GPU cool. This part of the cooler also cools the memory chips—the VRM is cooled by the airflow of the two fans.

On the next page, we dive deep into the PCB layout and VRM configuration.