ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1650 Gaming OC review: Turing gets really cheap

Yet another budget card

NVIDIA is working hard to fill out the more affordable end of its range of Turing graphics cards. The company just launched the GeForce GTX 1650, the latest addition to its GeForce GTX family of Turing GPUs. As is usual for cards at the lower end of the product line-up, there will be no Founders Edition model, and NVIDIA is going straight to launch with a bevy of custom cards from its partners.

Among the first to land in our lab is the ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1650 Gaming OC - a dual-fan model that boasts ASUS' DirectCU II cooler and IP5X dust resistance. It's a little on the beefy side for a card with a TDP of just 75W, which is both a good and bad thing. While the GeForce GTX 1650 technically starts at US$149, you can expect the additional features of the card to drive up its price. At the time of writing, ASUS hasn't revealed the local pricing for the card yet, but it's currently listed on Newegg for US$179. And while the more robust feature set is certainly nice, the fact remains that it can sometimes push the price of the card outside the budget of its intended audience. 

That said, the ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1650 Gaming OC offers much of what ASUS' other ROG Strix cards do. This includes semi-passive fans that will stop spinning when the GPU temperature falls below 55°C, Aura Sync RGB lighting, and a single FanConnect II 4-pin header. There's a metal backplate as well, which helps protect the PCB and conveys a more premium feel to the card. 

The power delivery subsystem comprises of a 4+1-phase design and solid polymer capacitors and alloy chokes that ASUS says will last longer and won't produce annoying buzzing noises. In addition, the card is manufactured using the company's Auto-Extreme Technology, which basically relies on automation for better reliability and consistency.

For display connectors, it has two HDMI 2.0b and two DisplayPort 1.4 outputs.

However, while NVIDIA's reference design technically doesn't require an external power connector, ASUS has included a single 6-pin PCIe connector anyway. 

Here's a table showing how the reference specifications stack up against its closest siblings:

The ASUS card sticks to the same base clock, but it has a significantly higher 1,830MHz boost clock in Gaming Mode. This goes up to 1,860MHz in OC Mode, but the card ships in Gaming Mode by default.

The TU116 GPU that the GeForce GTX 1650 uses is a smaller variant of the TU117 chip in the GeForce GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti. You'll notice that it features markedly fewer streaming multiprocessors, which also means fewer CUDA cores, texture units, and ROPs. It still has most of the benefits of the Turing architecture though, which you can read about it in further detail in my review of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. I say most though, because it is actually missing something, and that's the new NVENC video encoder that the other Turing cards have. Instead, NVIDIA has slipped in the older Volta NVENC encoder, which means you don't get the 15 per cent boost in efficiency and new features to avoid artifacting. 

This isn't really a deal-breaker since someone who buys the GeForce GTX 1650 probably isn't into content creation or streaming, but it's still a puzzling omission on NVIDIA's end.

That aside, the card is still a step up from the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti, with more CUDA cores and higher memory bandwidth. According to NVIDIA, the GeForce GTX 1650 should also be up to twice as fast as the GeForce GTX 950, and it's no doubt hoping owners of older, budget systems will upgrade. 

Test Setup

The detailed specifications of our new graphics card testbed system is as follows:-

• Intel Core i7-8086K (4.0GHz, 12MB L3 cache)
• ASUS ROG Strix Maximus X Hero (Intel Z370)
• 4 x 8GB G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3000 (Auto timings: CAS 15-15-15-35)
• Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SSD
• Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
• Acer Predator X27, 4K monitor

The full line-up of graphics cards and their driver versions are listed below:

• ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1650 Gaming OC (ForceWare 430.39)
• ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming OC (ForceWare 418.91)
• ASUS Phoenix GeForce GTX 1660 (ForceWare 419.35)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB Founders Edition (ForceWare 417.35)

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Benchmarks

Next up, here's a list of all the benchmarks used:

• 3DMark
• Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
• Far Cry 5
• Middle-earth: Shadow of War
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Tom Clancy's The Division

We used the Fire Strike Extreme benchmark and stress test in 3DMark for our temperature  and power consumption tests respectively.

3DMark

The synthetic 3DMark benchmark tests graphics and computational performance at different resolutions, starting at 1080p and going all the way up to 4K. A series of two graphics test, one physics test, and then a combined test stress your hardware in turn to assess its performance.

Right off the bat, it's clear that the GeForce GTX 1650 is more than just a small step down from even the GeForce GTX 1660. It is 38 per cent slower than the latter, and a good 55 per cent behind the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti in Fire Strike.

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation

Ashes of the Singularity has long been the poster child for the performance benefits a low-level API like DirectX 12 can bring. It is based on the Nitrous engine and can be extremely punishing thanks to the huge number of onscreen units and the sheer level of detail accorded to each unit. However, the CPU does become the limiting factor at lower resolutions and settings. 

Unfortunately, the GeForce GTX 1650 failed to break the 60fps mark here, even at 1080p and High settings. Compared to the GeForce GTX 1660, it was 34 per cent slower. 

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Mankind Divided features just about every trick to make your game look pretty, including things like volumetric and dynamic lighting, screenspace reflections, and cloth physics. Even though it was released in 2016, the game is capable of bringing even the most powerful systems to their knees. 

As in Ashes of the Singularity, it seems like the card can't really handle High settings if you want to get more than 60fps. Cranking things up to Ultra is also super punishing, and you shouldn't really be thinking about enjoying any eye candy if you've got this card. 

Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5 is actually an AMD launch title, so it'll be interesting to see how the green camp fares here. 

The GeForce GTX 1650 is 34 per cent slower than the GeForce GTX 1660 and 21 per cent behind the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB at 1080p and High settings. Far Cry 5 appears to be slightly less demanding to run than the other games, but you're probably still better off turning the settings down to Low. 

Middle-earth: Shadow of War

The results are pretty similar here as well, and High settings and 1080p are probably the upper limit of what the card can manage. 

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the GeForce GTX 1650 trailed the GeForce GTX 1660 by a good 31 per cent. 

Tom Clancy's The Division

The GeForce GTX 1650 is once again no match for its more powerful siblings, falling behind the GeForce GTX 1660 by a whopping 46 per cent. 

Temperature and power consumption

The DirectCU II cooler on the ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1650 performs really well here, and both ROG Strix cards were significantly cooler than the other two models. It is also fairly quiet, and I have no complaints about noise. 

When it comes to power consumption, the card unsurprisingly drew power quite sparingly when compared to its more powerful counterparts. 

1080p gaming on a budget

Budget cards are always awkward to review. You know they're not going to serve up very exciting performance numbers, but they also happen to be really cheap, so you can't really complain. In the case of the GeForce GTX 1650, it's quite a bit slower than the GeForce GTX 1660, but it can still conceivably push over 60fps in most games, as long as you stick to 1080p and Low to Medium settings. 

Given its target audience, I can't really call it a bad card, even if it really looks lackluster compared to the other Turing cards. NVIDIA wants to create a card for everyone, and eventually it's going to reach a point where it's simply impossible to be wowed by the performance numbers anymore. The GeForce GTX 1650 feels like it's at that point, and it's really the card you look to when you're on a shoestring budget. 

Having said that, if you can wait, you'll be much better served if you save up and get the GeForce GTX 1660 or 1660 Ti.

The main draw of the GeForce GTX 1650 feels like its plug-and-play capabilities, where you technically don't even require an external power connector. This means it's great for compact, mini-ITX systems or older PCs that simply require a working GPU. It makes most sense as a diminutive single-fan card, the better to keep price and power draw low, which is why the ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1650 is so confusing. 

It has a bunch of premium features that no one really needs, like the FanConnect II header (do you really need an extra fan header in a system with a 75W card?), dual-fan cooler, and metal backplate. As I said in my review of the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming OC, the people who are looking at these cards don't require so many features, and this is a problem that is only more glaring with a card like the GeForce GTX 1650. 

In a nutshell, if you really can't wait and need a cheap card right this moment, or you just need a GPU for your living room HTPC, you can give this card a look (hopefully, the cheaper variants of it). Otherwise, you'll get much better bang for your buck further up the Turing ladder. 

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