Overall and Final Verdict
Honestly when I get crazy cards like the RTX 2080 Ti and other high-end hardware in you might think it would be hard to be excited about the stuff that is more budget-friendly and with the original GTX 1650 I might agree with you. It was a decent card, but the GTX 1650 SUPER is a big step forward in hardware. You are basically getting a slightly cut down GTX 1660 and with the addition of GDDR6 the GTX 1650 SUPER is actually an interesting card. The performance difference is enough to push the GTX 1650 SUPER up into the range of the GTX 1660 in some situations. With that it is also running with the RX580 which may be a little old, but is and was a solid card that also has VR capabilities.
The Zotac GTX 1650 SUPER Twin Fan itself is also interesting because of its smaller size. It is extremely compact which frankly more cards should aim for. It has the color neutral black and silver styling with an angular fan shroud that basically ever card has right now, but I think it’s a good look. Its small size did lead to small fans which translated to a loud card when I got into testing. It doesn’t have the high pitch sounds like blower cards, so it wasn’t as obvious but overall it landed high up on our noise charts in the real world under load test which is the most important. The cooler also has an extruded aluminum heatsink design that when combined with the size of the card and the smaller fans does run a little warm and didn’t leave much headroom.
Overall the compact Zotac GTX 1650 SUPER Twin Fan is a great pickup if you just need solid 1080p performance and because of the size, it is ideal for SFF builds as well. The move to the TU116 for the GPU also means this is the cheapest option to get you Nvidia’s Turing based NVENC encoder which now that Plex servers support NVENC you could use this card as a big performance upgrade for a Plex server or for a streaming PC. The Turing NVENC can support up to 8K encoding at 30FPS which is a big jump over past models including the Volta-based NVENC in the original GTX 1650.
So what about pricing? The RX580 did come out just a touch ahead in performance when all of the numbers were averaged, but overall the GTX 1650 SUPER and the RX580 traded blows. So that was my biggest concern for pricing. The GTX 1650 SUPER Twin Fan has an MSRP of $159.99 and as of today there is one RX580 on sale at that price, but overall the RX580’s are running more making the pricing for this card basically exactly what it should be. I think the Turing NVENC adds a little value as well. The only issue is currently you can’t get this specific card at the MSRP, it is sold out at Newegg and is listed higher from secondary venders. So this is a great option that really opens up the possibility of a solid performing 1080p PC build at an extremely low price!
Live Pricing: HERE
