NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 650 Ti offers much better performance than the normal GTX 650. The GTX 650 uses GK107 silicon, whereas the GTX 650 Ti uses GK106 silicon, which is also used on the GTX 660. This change makes the card 30% faster than the GTX 650, which is still much slower than the GTX 660. Overall, we see decent performance for 1680x1050 gaming; full HD 1080p gaming is asking a bit too much from the card, although it should be able to handle HD 1080p gaming at lower details settings. Compared to AMD's offerings, the card sits right between the HD 7770 and HD 7850. ZOTAC's AMP! Edition comes with a large overclock on both GPU and memory; other GTX 650 Tis had no memory overclock. Overclocking the memory helped the card gain a nice performance boost because the GTX 650 Ti is relatively bandwidth limited. ZOTAC also doubled the memory size of their card to 2 GB, which can barely make a difference. Its extra memory size only causes improvements with a few games, like Battlefield 3 and Skyrim, at 2560x1600: a resolution that's clearly impractical for the GTX 650 Ti because overall performance is just not fast enough.
Power consumption of the card is low in all states. The card requires much less power in non-gaming states than competing designs from AMD. During gaming, performance per watt is great as well; that is, a bit better than AMD, but the difference is relatively small. The extra memory adds to power consumption, but the difference is negligible.
The low power consumption also affects heat output and fan noise. We see outstanding noise levels from ZOTAC's latest card – temperatures are low in both idle and load. The GTX 650 Ti AMP! Edition will essentially be inaudible in any contemporary system that has fans for CPU cooling and case ventilation.
ZOTAC has, in addition to the two DVI outputs that we can find on other boards, put two full-size HDMI outputs on their card. Having two HDMI outputs is quite uncommon, but could come in handy if you want to connect multiple TV screens to the card.
Overclocking the GPU doesn't work as well as on other boards, but memory makes up for that. In the end, the ZOTAC GTX 650 Ti AMP! Edition reaches the highest overclocked real-life performance of all GTX 650 Ti cards we tested so far. Just to clarify, this is not an effect of the extra memory, but the higher memory overclock that we reached.
ZOTAC's 2 GB AMP! Edition comes at a $185 price point, which is clearly too high. The extra 1 GB of memory contributes a lot to the price increase, and it does not provide enough extra performance to justify the cost. NVIDIA's 1 GB reference design is available at $150 and is roughly 10% slower than the GTX 650 Ti AMP! For example, the aging HD 6950 can be found at $170 (14% faster), and $185 will get you a HD 7850 2 GB that is about 17% faster. Another interesting option is the 1 GB HD 7850, which can be had for extremely competitive $165 and provides the same exact performance as the 2 GB version in all realistic tests. On the other hand, the GTX 650 Ti comes with better power and noise than most other cards you can find on the market today.