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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 - The Affordable Kepler

By Kenny Yeo - 24 Sep 2012

Temperature, Power Consumption and Overclocking

Temperature

Since the scores of our reference GeForce GTX 650 was 'simulated' by downclocking the MSI GTX 650 Power Edition, we will only be reporting the temperature, power consumption and overclocking scores for the MSI card.

The MSI GTX 650 Power Edition ran really cool, recording a maximum operating temperature of only 49 degrees Celsius, significantly lower than our reference Radeon HD 7750 and HD 7770. To test MSI’s TwinThermal cooling system, we also measured the temperature of the card with the cooler in its two positions. With the additional cooler stacked on top of the existing one, temperatures dipped slightly to 47 degrees Celsius. With the additional fan placed along side, temperatures dipped even more to 44 degrees Celsius

 

 

Power Consumption

According to NVIDIA, the official TDP of the GeForce GTX 650 is just 64W. However, our MSI GTX 650 Power Edition recorded power draw figures that suggests it is not as power-thrifty as a reference card would be. Our system's maximum recorded power draw was around 173W, a good 13% more than the Radeon HD 7750. It’ll be interesting to see how much less power a reference-design GeForce GTX 650 would draw because it doesn't have a PCIe Molex power connector like the MSI card that's geared for overclocking.

 

 

Overclocking

The MSI GTX 650 Power Edition is an able overclocker. By maxing out the voltages of the GPU core, memory and PLL, we were able to run the card at 1284MHz at the core and 5400MHz DDR at the memory, significantly higher than the card’s stock speeds. This gave us 3540 3DMarks at the Performance preset and 1146 3DMarks at the Extreme preset - an increase of 10% and 12% respectively. 

 

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