MSI 6GB DDR-6 NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX-1650

The GeForce GTX 1650 was inevitable, considering none of the other Turing GPUs can fill the role of a budget version of the best graphics cards. This is likely the final implementation of the Turing architecture (at least on 12nm). The new TU117 chip means Nvidia now has everything from the extreme GeForce RTX 2080 Ti through the more reasonable RTX 2060 for ray tracing fans, with the GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660 dropping the RT and Tensor cores in favor of lower prices.

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), which in turn determines the number of CUDA cores, texture units, and ROPs. It's still built using TSMC's 12nm lithography, leaving 7nm for AMD's Radeon VII for now. The result is a die size that's about a third lower than the TU116, with 4.7 billion transistors.

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 gives it 128GB/s of bandwidth, slightly more than the GTX 1050 Ti. It also has 32 ROPs (Render Outputs).

For the GPU core, TU117 and the GTX 1650 has 14 SMs, which means 896 CUDA cores and 56 texture units. As with all other Turing GPUs, the GTX 1650 can do concurrent FP32 and INT calculations, which can speed up gaming workloads anywhere from 15-35 percent (depending on the game), relative to the previous Pascal architecture. It's worth pointing out that the desktop 1650 doesn't use a fully enabled TU117 either, as there's a mobile variant with 16 SMs and 1024 CUDA cores, so we may see a GTX 1650 Ti in the future—in fact I'd count on it.

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 1665MHz, giving it 2984 GFLOPS of theoretical performance. 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 6-pin PCIe power connector, though factory overclocked cards (like the MSI GTX 1650 Gaming X 4G that I'm using) have higher clockspeeds and require a 6-pin PEG connector.

Factory overclocked models like the Asus and MSI cards I'm using for testing of course cost more than the base models. However, if you want something faster than a base GTX 1650, you should probably look at the GTX 1660 or AMD's RX 570/580, or even a previous generation GTX 1060. They require more power than the 1650, but any PSU with the required 6-pin connector should more than suffice.