
Kepler's Swan Song arrives with a GTX badge Nvidia has been popping out Kepler cards like a circus clown car since the company launched its 6-series GPUs in early 2012, and now we finally reach the bottom of the GTX barrel with the $150 GeForce GTX 650 Ti. This card slots in right below the $230 GTX 660 and has less of everythingâ"less CUDA, less memory (and a narrower memory bus width), and less PCB. Though a 6-inch PCB is certainly not smallâ"coughâ"it makes the 650 Ti the smallest card weâve tested in a while. Since this particular board is overclocked, Gigabyte has bolted on a dual-fan cooling mechanism that adds three inches to the cardâs length. Gigabyte has also doubled the card's RAM allotment over the reference design to 2GB. The extra RAM and cooling adds $20 to the price tag, as well. Don't let its size fool you: Underneath the massive cooling shroud lies a wee 6-inch PCB. In addition to the down-specâd nature of the GTX 650 Ti, itâs also missing two performance-related features: SLI for dual-card gaming and GPU Boost functionality, so the board won't overclock automatically during gaming. To its credit though, Gigabyte ships this card overclocked by 107MHz, and you can crank it up even further via the companyâs OC Guru II software. Given its massive cooling apparatus, we're sure the card can handle it. In testing, the little gipper outperformed AMD cards in a similar price range, besting both the Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870 by sma
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