ZOTAC GTX650 Ti AMP! Review

👤by Richard Weatherstone Comments 📅07-10-12
Conclusion
The NVIDIA GTX650 Ti present an interesting proposition. On the one hand it is an extremely quiet, near silent GPU capable of playing today's games at a respectable resolution. On the other hand at £150 it is not a product that could be accused of being cheap. Couple this with NVIDIA's block on overclocking with this product and the sweetness this product presents soon begins to turn sour.

The packaging of ZOTAC's latest GPU is very good and it should ensure the product reaches you in perfect condition. The card itself is a very good looking component and because of its demur it will fit in almost any PC setup should you have a 400W power supply to hand. As previously stated, it's cool and quiet and quite a capable performer at lower resolutions. Any more than 1920x1080 with a little filtering and the whole affair becomes a slideshow making games unplayable. To be fair to the card, it was never designed to play at Ultra settings so dedicated gamers should consider something else with more grunt.



Our biggest gripe with the GTX650Ti is the lack of GPU Boost. While this is hardly ZOTAC's fault and we are no major fan of the feature, we would like the flexibility overclocking affords so to remove this feature is an odd, if somewhat business astute decision. We only hope NVIDIA have not shot themselves in the foot with this omission. Thankfully, the ZOTAC version of the GTX650Ti does however come pre-overclocked from 925MHz to 1033MHz and therefore deserves some credit as it will be faster than a reference design. Overclocking is still there though although not as big as it perhaps would have been with GPU boost enabled.

On the plus side, NVIDIA pitched the GTX650Ti against the AMD HD7770 and in this battle, NVIDIA destroyed the AMD card, at times almost doubling the performance. It did so while being cooler and quieter too so while it may cost a little more both to buy and to run, the performance gains are certainly worth it.

To summarise; if you are looking for an entry level, low-noise graphics card with a small footprint the ZOTAC GTX650 Ti AMP! is certainly worthy of consideration. Were it to come with a lower price tag and overclocking options then it would lay solid claim to our Gold award for being best entry level GPU available however this time around it will have to settle for our Silver award.

Pros:
+ Kepler Architecture
+ DirectX 11
+ Very Quiet
+ Small size
+ Significantly faster than a HD7770

Cons:
- Don't buy this card to play games above 1920x1080 resolution
- No GPU Boost Feature
- No SLI


Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.


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