Introduction

NVIDIA today released the GeForce GTX 1650 Super graphics card. This is the second GTX 16-series Super model from NVIDIA, as the company makes product-stack adjustments across the bottom-end of its "Turing" GPU lineup. These graphics cards are crucial for the company's bottom-line as they sell in huge volumes; the sub-$200 market is the gateway segment to Full HD gaming at 60 FPS. These are the price points at which gamers who choose the PC over consoles spend some money to upgrade their otherwise basic home desktops to gaming-capable machines. AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 5500 graphics card threatens NVIDIA's GTX 16-series just in the same way the RX 5700 destabilized the lower-end of the RTX 20 lineup, forcing three new product launches to prevent cannibalization.

The RTX 2060 Super was launched as the RTX 2060 lost competitiveness to the RX 5700, and the RTX 2070 Super as the RX 5700 XT beat the RTX 2070. To prevent the RTX 2070 Super from hurting sales of NVIDIA's $700 RTX 2080, NVIDIA also refreshed the RTX 2080 with the faster RTX 2080 Super. With the GTX 16-series, the challenge of keeping these SKUs competitive is higher as NVIDIA can't play its "ray tracing" card here. There is a level playing field between the GTX 16-series and the RX 5500 series—pure raster graphics.



The GeForce GTX 1650 Super is launched to restore NVIDIA's competitiveness in the sub-$200 market, as AMD extensively compared the RX 5500 to the original GTX 1650 in its marketing slides. AMD claims that the RX 5500 is over 30 percent faster than the GTX 1650, and possibly matches or beats the GTX 1660. This invited a two-fold response from NVIDIA. The GTX 1660 Super was launched last month at $230, offering performance close to the $280 GTX 1660 Ti. The GTX 1650 Super is being launched today to restore competition under the $200-mark. The GTX 1650 Super is being launched at an MSRP of US$160 with headroom for board partners to price their custom-design cards at up to $200 or thereabouts.

Unlike the original GTX 1650 non-Super, the new GeForce GTX 1650 Super is based on the "TU116" silicon rather than the tiny "TU117" that powers the GTX1650. "TU116" is the same chip on which NVIDIA built its GTX 1660 trio. The "TU116" as the GTX 1650 Super is configured with a 128-bit GDDR6 memory interface holding 4 GB of memory. Even at its memory clock of 12 Gbps, this setup produces 192 GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is a massive 50% increase compared to the 128 GB/s of the original GTX 1650. NVIDIA also endowed the GTX 1650 Super with more muscle than the original—1,280 CUDA cores compared to the original's 896, a 42 (!) percent increase. There are proportionate increases in TMUs: 80 vs. 56. The GPU clock speeds have also been dialed up to 1725 MHz GPU Boost compared to the original's 1665 MHz. These changes also increase the card's typical board power metric to 100 W, up from 75 W on the original. The card needs at least a 6-pin PCIe power connector, while the original GTX 1650 could make do with none.

This review covers the Palit GeForce GTX 1650 Super StormX OC, which is the company's highest-clocked GTX 1650 Super variant and the highest clocked GTX 1650 Super available at this time. It comes with a rated boost frequency of 1770 MHz, which is 45 MHz higher than the NVIDIA reference. According to Palit, pricing is $170, a mild $10 increase over the NVIDIA MSRP, which leaves space for the company's GTX 1650 Super StormX (non-OC) that retails at MSRP.

Packaging and Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Documentation

The Card

Palit is following the visual theme of their other GeForce GTX 16 Series cards by using a mix of matte and glossy black plastic for their cooler. The design is highly compact, which could make it a good choice for an SFF computer or media PC. A backplate is not included.


Dimensions of the card are 17.0 cm x 12.0 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include one DisplayPort 1.4a, one HDMI 2.0b, and one dual-link DVI port. This DVI connector lacks analog pins; should you still have an analog VGA monitor, you'll have to buy an active DVI-to-VGA adapter.

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.

At CES 2019, NVIDIA announced that all their graphics cards will now support VESA Adaptive Sync (aka FreeSync). While only a small number of FreeSync monitors have been fully qualified with G-SYNC, users can enable the feature in NVIDIA's control panel regardless of whether the monitor is certified or not.


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


GeForce GTX 1650 Super does not support SLI.

Disassembly

Palit's heatsink is very simple; basically, it's just a slab of metal with fins—there are no heatpipes or a copper base. The fan is 100 mm in diameter.

What's surprising is that there is no cooling for the VRM circuitry or memory chips. Overclocking works very well though, especially on memory, so there doesn't seem to be much reason for concern.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles or forum posts.



High-res versions are also available (front, back).