NVIDIA's new GTX 1650 is built around the TU117, their smallest graphics processor. It features all the improvements of the Turing architecture, like larger caches, concurrent execution of float and integer operations, and adaptive/variable-rate shading. What's missing (like on all the other GeForce 16-series cards) is support for RTX real-time raytracing and DLSS, which have been removed to save on chip area, reducing cost.

Palit overclocked their card to a rated boost clock of 1725 MHz out of the box, which can be considered a medium-sized overclock for the GTX 1650. Unfortunately, memory isn't overclocked even though the chips can certainly take it as our manual overclocking results show. Averaged over all our benchmarks at 1080p, the Palit GTX 1650 StormX is 35% faster than the GTX 1050 Ti and 10% behind the Radeon RX 570. This makes the card 12% slower than even the GTX 1060 3 GB and 26% slower than GTX 1060 6 GB, and puts it a whopping 50% behind the GTX 1660 (the next step up in the Turing product stack). This is strong evidence NVIDIA will release a GTX 1650 Ti to fill that hole in their lineup. With those performance levels, the GTX 1650 is not good enough for 60 FPS gaming at 1080p with highest details, but you should be able reach that FPS rate in most games with reduced details.

Palit's cooler is a very simple design that's highly cost-optimized. It works without heatpipes, and the heatsink doesn't have as much surface area as on other cards. As a result, temperatures are a bit higher than on other models we tested before. With 68°C, they should be considered "low", though. It seems that in order to reach those temperatures Palit has dialed up fan speeds, which leads to increased fan noise. With 34 dBA, the card will definitely be audible in a quiet system, but it's not noisy or distracting. Still, I would have personally designed the card for higher temperatures, slightly above 70°C, for less fan noise. Unfortunately, the idle-fan-stop feature which shuts the fans off completely during idle, Internet browsing, and light gaming is missing, too, which would have been useful for a low-noise living room computer.

Like all other Turing GPUs, power efficiency of the GTX 1650 is excellent. Compared to recent releases, like the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti, power efficiency has been improved once again, by around 10%, which is not an easy engineering feat. Palit's card can also shine when it comes to non-gaming power consumption as 3 W in idle is the lowest power draw we've ever seen. Just as impressive is 4 W Blu-Ray playback—just a quarter of what the 16 W RX 570 uses. Gaming power consumption is just as impressive. With 64 W in gaming, the card is the most power efficient GTX 1650 we've tested so far; it's around 2.5x as power-efficient as AMD's RX 570. Unlike other GTX 1650 cards we tested before, the Palit StormX does not use an additional 6-pin power connector—all energy is supplied via the PCI-Express slot.

Palit's GTX 1650 StormX OC comes at the NVIDIA MSRP of $150. The problem is that NVIDIA's price point is simply too high to beat the other options in this market segment. For example, AMD's Radeon RX 570 can be found online for $130 and offers significantly higher performance. If you are willing to buy used, you'll find a ton of graphics cards between $100 and $200 that will offer better price/performance, too. One thing the Palit GTX 1650 StormX has going for it is that you can just plop it into any old computer and get a massive boost to graphics performance without having to upgrade the power supply. Not requiring an additional 6-pin power helps because many OEM computers don't have a spare 6-pin power connector on their PSU. This also takes out a lot of complexity for less experienced users because all they have to do is plug in the card and connect the monitor (which is still scary enough for many of them). The closest cards without additional power are the RX 560 and GTX 1050 Ti—both are much much slower than the GTX 1650. While I am a bit reluctant to give our the "Recommended" award due to pricing, there exists no alternative on the market if you want to move on from integrated graphics or upgrade an older system in the most simple way.