MSI GTX 1650 Gaming X 4G

Nvidia’s new GPU brings a modest boost in performance

- Jarred Walton

THE GEFORCE GTX 1650 was inevitable, considering none of the other Turing GPUs can fill the role of a budget graphics card. This is likely the final implementation of the Turing architecture (at least on 12nm). The GTX 1650 uses a new TU117 GPU, which is a smaller and thus less expensive variant of the TU116 that powers the GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti cards. The key differences relative to the 1660 line are in the memory configuration and number of SMs (streaming multiprocessors).

As expected, the GTX 1650 has 4GB of GDDR5, clocked at 8GT/s—the same speed as the GTX 1660 as well as the previous-generation GTX 1060 cards. Four active memory controllers on a 128-bit bus give it 128GB/s of bandwidth, slightly more than the GTX 1050 Ti.

Nvidia is typically conservative with its reported boost clocks, with most cards running well above the given speed. The “stock” GTX 1650 has a boost clock of 1,665MHz. That’s less than the GTX 1060 cards, but roughly 50 percent faster than the GTX 1050. The GTX 1650 is also designed to run without a six-pin PCIe power connector, though factory overclocked cards, like this MSI GTX 1650 Gaming X 4G, have higher clock speeds, and require a six-pin PEG connector.