The Palit GeForce GTX 1650 KalmX is the fastest passively cooled graphics card available today. The next-fastest option is Palit's own GTX 1050 Ti KalmX. Looking at options from other vendors, only fanless designs for Radeon R5 230 (2014) and GT 1030 (2017) exist, which can achieve just a fraction of the GTX 1650's performance and use much older technology.

However, being based on the GTX 1650 and its TU117 graphics processor means you have to be realistic in terms of gaming performance. Averaged over all our benchmarks at 1080p, we see the Palit GTX 1650 KalmX end up a little bit below 1080p 60 FPS in many titles. Its performance is actually a little bit lower than the NVIDIA GTX 1650 reference, by 3%. The reason for that is that the card will reach the thermal limit of 83°C, at which point NVIDIA's Boost algorithm will boost the frequency of the card less aggressively. It definitely does not go below base clock—we made sure to check for that. What rather happens is that clocks will vary in a band between 1665 and 1800 MHz, which is still quite good and "working as intended." Compared to other cards, we see the Palit KalmX 13% behind the GTX 1060 3 GB, 15% behind the RX 570, and 28% behind the GTX 1060 6 GB. AMD's recently released RX 5500 XT is 36% faster—good enough for 1080p maximum details gaming. The GTX 1650 is not good enough for 60 FPS at 1080p with highest details, but you should be able reach that FPS rate in most games with reduced details.

Right now AMD is making a lot of noise for their Ryzen 4000 "Renoir" based APUs. These come with 512 Vega-based cores at high clock speed. We predict that Renoir GPU performance will end up somewhere between the Ryzen 2400G and GTX 1050. In that case, the GTX 1650 will be around 50% faster than Renoir—not even close. If you are purely looking for video playback with no gaming, an APU or even Intel Integrated graphics could be sufficient, though.

Enthusiast media PC player builders will know of madVR, which offers several shader-based algorithms to dramatically improve the quality of compressed video: "makes SD look like HD." Some of these algorithms are very GPU intense, and the GTX 1650 will provide plenty of horsepower for that, something no other passive solution can achieve.

Palit is reusing their proven and tested cooler design from earlier KalmX cards, and that is a good choice. While temperatures do reach 83°C, they do so in a slow and orderly way (over 10 minutes), and as mentioned before, thermal throttling is minimal and won't affect your gaming experience. Palit made sure that their cooler fits into a two-slot profile, which is important for small form factor systems. The card is quite tall, though. With 14 cm, it's around 3.5 cm higher than the PCIe slot cover, which will limit case options somewhat. The length of the card should be no problem, and the fact that it doesn't require an additional power connector will help in cramped cases without limiting your PSU choices in any way. The unique selling point of the KalmX is its perfectly noise-free experience. We also couldn't spot any coil whine, not in idle, not during gaming.

What makes the GTX 1650 KalmX technically feasible is NVIDIA's highly energy efficient Turing architecture. The Palit GTX 1650 KalmX is the most power-efficient card we ever tested by quite a big margin: 14% better than RX 5700, 25% better than RTX Turing, 35% better than RX 5700 XT, 47% better than GTX 1060, twice as efficient as RX Vega, and 2.5x as efficient as AMD's Polaris.

Thanks to NVIDIA's modern Turing architecture, the KalmX has all the important features for media playback: the HDMI port is version 2.0b, which means 4K is supported, and HDR, too. The DisplayPort 1.4 connectors support output to 8K at 60 FPS or 4K at 120 FPS, which ensures you'll be able to pair this card with all the TVs to be released in coming years. Turing GPUs have powerful hardware encode/decode circuitry inside, which is able to accelerate H.264 and VP9, as well as H.265 at up to 8K, with up to 12 bit color. Only AMD's latest Navi chips offer similar features.

Surprisingly, we saw very good overclocking potential from the KalmX, probably because Palit was very conservative with their settings. GPU overclocking reached +7%, held back by the temperature limit because Boost would vary the clocks, so dialing in a specific overclock wasn't possible anymore. Palit is using memory chips from Samsung on the KalmX, and these overclock like crazy. We managed a 16% overclock with a minimal heat increase. Combined, these overclocks yielded a 11% real-life performance improvement, enough to reach 60 FPS in 1080p gaming in many titles.

Priced at $160, the GTX 1650 KalmX is $10 more expensive than the GTX 1650 MSRP, which is a reasonable price increase—usually, the low-noise tax is higher. The problem is that the GTX 1650 Super is available for $160, too, which makes it a much better deal since it offers almost 40% higher performance. Now, I can't blame Palit for not releasing a GTX 1650 Super KalmX because it's simply not possible with the Super's 100 W heat output; the GTX 1650 non-Super is the most energy efficient graphics design in history. Strong competition for the KalmX comes from all the recently released super-quiet graphics cards from various AMD and NVIDIA partners. For example, we've reviewed many cards that emit 27 dBA during full gaming load, which is virtually inaudible unless you put your ear right next to the graphics card. Personally, I'd be torn between having a very quiet card that's faster or a completely passive one that emits absolutely no noise. What would you pick? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.