The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Review, Feat. Zotac: Fighting Brute Force With Power Effi

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Following up on last week’s launch of NVIDIA’s new budget video card, the GeForce GTX 1650, today we’re taking a look at our first card, courtesy of Zotac. Coming in at $149, the newest member of the GeForce family brings up the rear of the GeForce product stack, offering NVIDIA’s latest architecture in a low-power, 1080p-with-compromises gaming video card with a lower price to match.

As the third member of the GeForce GTX 16 series, the GTX 1650 directly follows in the footsteps of its GTX 1660 predecessors. Built on a newer, smaller GPU specifically for these sorts of low-end cards, the underlying TU117 GPU is designed around the same leaner and meaner philosophy as TU116 before it. This means it eschews the dedicated ray tracing (RT) cores and the AI-focused tensor cores in favor of making smaller, easier to produce chips that retain the all-important core Turing architecture.

The net result of this process, the GeForce GTX 1650, is a somewhat unassuming card if we’re going by the numbers, but an important one for NVIDIA’s product stack. Though its performance is pedestrian by high-end PC gaming standards, the card fills out NVIDIA’s lineup by offering a modern Turing-powered card under $200. Meanwhile for the low-power video card market, the GTX 1650 is an important shot in the arm, offering the first performance boost for this hard-capped market in over two years. The end result is that the GTX 1650 will serve many masters, and as we’ll see, it serves some better than others.

Right off the bat, it’s interesting to note that the GTX 1650 is not using a fully-enabled TU117 GPU. Relative to the full chip, the version that’s going into the GTX 1650 has had a TPC fused off, which means the chip loses 2 SMs/64 CUDA cores. The net result is that the GTX 1650 is a very rare case where NVIDIA doesn’t put their best foot forward right off the bat – the company is essentially sandbagging – which is a point I’ll loop back around to here in a bit.

Within NVIDIA’s historical product stack, it’s somewhat difficult to place the GTX 1650. Officially it’s the successor to the GTX 1050, which itself was a similar cut-down card. However the GTX 1050 also launched at $109, whereas the GTX 1650 launches at $149, a hefty 37% generation-over-generation price increase. Consequently, you could be excused if you thought the GTX 1650 felt a lot more like the GTX 1050 Ti’s successor, as the $149 price tag is very comparable to the GTX 1050 Ti’s $139 launch price. Either way, generation-over-generation, Turing cards have been more expensive than the Pascal cards they have replaced, and the low price of these budget cards really amplifies this difference.

Diving into the numbers then, the GTX 1650 ships with 896 CUDA cores enabled, spread over 2 GPCs. This is actually not all that big of a step up from the GeForce GTX 1050 series on paper, but Turing’s architectural changes and effective increase in graphics efficiency mean that the little card should pack a bit more of a punch than it first shows on paper. The CUDA cores themselves are clocked a bit lower than usual for a Turing card, however, with the reference-clocked GTX 1650 boosting to just 1665MHz.

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