NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Video Card Review w/ MSI and EVGA

Temperature & Noise Testing

Temperatures are important to enthusiasts and gamers, so we took a bit of time and did some temperature testing on the three different clocked NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti graphics cards.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB Reference Card GPU-Z Idle:

EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB Superclocked GPU-Z Idle:

MSI GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB Power Edition GPU-Z Idle:

All three cards used different GPU coolers and have different VDDC readings at idle, but interestingly enough the cards idled within 1C of one another! The EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Superclocked and the NVIDIA GeForce FTX 650 Ti reference card both were observed at 25.0C in a room that was 22.0C (72F). The MSI N650Ti Power Edition uses the Cyclone II GPU cooler with heatpipes and this massive GPU cooler helped drop the temperature to 24C at idle. The fan on the MSI Cyclone II cooler was spinning at 1050 RPM and was the card was pretty much silent, not to say that the other two cards weren’t very quiet.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB Reference Card GPU-Z Load:

EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB Superclocked GPU-Z Load:

MSI GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB Power Edition GPU-Z Load:

With Furmark fired up and running at 1024×768 we saw the temperature reach 67C on the reference card, 70C on the EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Superclocked and 54C on the MSI N650Ti Power Edition. Notice that the fan RPMs jumped up to nearly just 50 RPM on the MSI N650Ti Power Edition cards Cyclone II GPU cooler! The MSI card certainly wins when it comes to idle and load temperatures with a decisive when in the load test. It’s impressive to see the MSI N650TI PE having the highest VDDC and a GPU temperature that is 16C cooler than the EVGA card!

Sound Testing

We recently upgraded our sound meter to an Extech sound level meter with 1.5dB accuracy that meets Type 2 standards. This meter ranges from 35dB to 90dB on the low measurement range, which is perfect for us as our test room usually averages around 38dB. We measure the sound level two inches above the corner of the motherboard with ‘A’ frequency weighting. The microphone wind cover is used to make sure no wind is blowing across the microphone, which would seriously throw off the data.

The MSI N650Ti Power Edition was near silent in our test system at both idle and load testing scenarios. We only observed a 50 RPM difference in the fan speed on the MSI Cyclone II GPU cooler, so the fan speed barely changes on this card. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti reference card and the EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Superclocked appear to be using the same fan speed and fan profile settings, so the noise levels were very similar. The clear winner when it comes to silence is the MSI N650Ti Power Edition as it runs nearly silent!