Overall and Final Verdict
When the GTX 650 Ti came in, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I mean, my wife ran over and started talking about how cute the card was because of its size. From past experience, cute doesn’t normally come with any performance so you can understand my surprise when the GTX 650 Ti stepped up and played everything I through at it very smoothly. Cooling performance could only be called average, I would have liked to see it out cool its competition, but it came out with the same temperatures altogether. My biggest complaint about the card itself is actually that it lacks an SLI bridge all together. Considering the HD 7770 supports crossfire, I found this to be an interesting choice.
Where it does get interesting is trying to calculate price and performance. AMD’s closest card performance wise is the HD 7770. A quick look on a few online retailers shows the HD 7770 selling for between $110 and $140 after rebates. The GTX 650 Ti outperformed the HD 7770 in all of our testing by a comfortable margin, but with the GTX 650 Ti launching at $149 it really depends on if you are looking for more performance or a better value. I feel that at almost $40 less the HD 7770 offers a slightly better value, but the GTX 650 Ti is offering performance at a price point that AMD doesn’t really have any competing cards at. Of course something that I didn’t figure into that calculation that changes things considerably is NVidia’s choice to bundle the upcoming game Assassin’s Creed 3 with the GTX 650 Ti. When add that into the equation, you are basically buying a $60 game and a video card for $89. When taking that into account, the GTX 650 Ti is a steal. The only downside to that is if you weren’t planning on getting the game in the first place, you aren’t getting as good of a deal. But ether way you still end up with one of this years most anticipated games for free at launch!
