Gadgetory

all right so I'm shooting this video on the day of launch for the GTX 1650 and this video was not going up on launch day because in video for some odd reason decided not to release their drivers for this card to the press until the embargo lifted which is first time I've ever seen it done that way but that's a completely different topic we can go on and on about that still I'm going to be playing around with the GTX 16:50 today and showing off potentially its greatest feature which is the fact that it can run without the PCIe connector gets all of its power straight through the PCIe slot it's a 75 watt TDP chip runs a very low power is very power efficient so it can easily drop into systems that have weak power supplies or ones that have no free PCIe connectors and potentially ones that are running on integrated graphics to hopefully breathe new life into a dying system so that's exactly what we're doing today to see if we can actually turn it into a relatively decent and playable gaming PC now I actually have my hands computer this is their old family computer but it's a little too old it's like 1011 years old it's an HP Pavillion probably a Core 2 Duo or something like that I kind of forget but to my disappointment PCI slots no PCI Express it's too old so it's not gonna work which is why I took it to Craigslist and this is the PC that I landed on this is a Dell Vostro dello stato 470 pre-built with an Intel Core i5 at 3.1 gigahertz it doesn't list the actual model but a quick Google search reveals Dell valestra 470 that this is potentially a core i5 3450 a 3.1 gigahertz base clock quad core quad core processor on the h77 chipset that's actually not too bad we also have 8 gigs of memory presumably ddr3 750 gig hard drive Wi-Fi HDMI bluetooth Windows 10 until HD graphics no mention of a discrete GPU here in the listed price one hundred and ninety five dollars but being the crafty salesman I am I talked him down to a hundred and fifty actually no I just asked him right out of the gate can you do 150 and he said yes so that means with this 150 dollar GPU we're essentially putting together a 300 dollar system and seeing just how well we can game on looks like we actually have to meet him right now it's its skin 30 so let's go buy a computer all right we got the PC the transaction went very smoothly the guy was super nice I didn't really know much about the system in case you're curious I think it was his sisters but his sister since moved to Mexico and has no need for the system anymore so he sold it to me so 150 bucks for a quad core i5 even though it is third gen this prebuilt must have come out around 2012 in that case and it's actually in fairly decent shape for being 7 years old I mean it's got you know normal signs of wear and tear some scuffs but overall it looks pretty good and I even took a look inside while I was at the guys place but I'll show you guys as well so here's a look pretty standard looking for a prebuilt cable management is virtually non-existent three bins right here one two three so I'm guessing two of them are two gigs and then one's a four gig stick because we have eight in total here's our basic little CPU cooler with our core i5 3450 quad core CPU base clock of 3.1 with a max turbo up to 3.5 gigahertz just below we have our single ECI Express by 16 slide but one is all we need we are good to go there there's the chipset our little h77 Express chipset doesn't even need a heatsink what a baller please look it look it leave this mSATA it's gonna insert a slot that's cool SATA hard drive 750 gigs and I looked it up at 7200 rpm we do get the standard SATA connections no IDE here that was a little bit before its time this is a 350 watt unit which is actually perfect because the GTX 1650 has a minimum power supply requirement of 300 watts so right on the money there it does have a spare 6 pin PCI II connector but we'll just we'll just ignore that besides I know there are pre volts out there that have similar specs that do not have extra connectivity for a discrete GPU so this is still for all intensive purposes a pretty good example of the kind of system somebody might consider upgrading with the gtx 1650 and it looks like we've got some optical drives here let's take a look okay that is a DVD combo drive okay so card reader 2 USB 3 2 USB 2 look at the back 4 USB 2 2 USB 3 or je 45 Ethernet LAN port d-sub HDMI s/pdif out then we have a multi-channel audio not too bad actually overall it's in fairly good shape and while it is dirty quill dusty and stuff it's actually not I've seen a lot worse ok I think we're finally ready to install the GTX 1650 let's fire it up all right we are finally ready to game and I say finally because it actually took a lot longer than you might imagine to get to this point after I installed the video card let me briefly talk about the the process really quick so after I installed the discrete GPU our GTX 16:50 I immediately uninstalled it because I want to initially boot the system without a video card just as is so I can take a closer look at the system and see what we were working with I did test the system powered on at Craigslist dude's house but I didn't want to spend too much time or linger because I was in the middle of his living room and stuff so I powered on the system and it booted straight into Windows 10 Pro no problem it's worth noting that this system originally shipped with Windows 7 so it's been updated since and it looked to be a clean install there were no user files the C Drive was pretty much empty which is exactly what you should do if you're gonna sell a used PC you should definitely wipe the drive first so that also was nice to see plus I didn't have to worry about any kind of malicious or suspicious files left over by the previous admin once I checked out everything and it looked pretty good to go and all in order I powered the system down then reinstalled our GTX 16:50 powered back up and got a black screen I went to the splash screen for a minute and then completely black which indicates that we need a BIOS update uninstall the discrete GPU thought I could actually boot into Windows again downloaded the latest bios from the Dells port page which was from 2018 a hell of a lot more recent than the one that was on here and then ran the executable file in Windows was actually the first time in a while that I've updated a BIOS straight from a Windows environment the BIOS update was a success so I powered down the system before reinstalling the discrete GPU again rebooting and this time we went straight into Windows 10 no problem but then began the long series of Windows updates getting us to build 1809 took four or five maybe six hours I would assume because I left it overnight so we got up to build 1809 that allowed us to install the GeForce drivers because the system was so out of date and video drivers wouldn't even take so once that was done we were finally ready to game I guess this is all to say that if you have an aging desktop and you're planning to pop a brand new GPU in there it might not necessarily be so plug-and-play there may be several steps that you need to take along the way in order to get your build up to speed so that it plays nicely with your brand new graphics card the last optional step I did here was overclocking our G 16:50 obviously the cpu has a luck multiplier so it can't be overclocked but I did dial in a really quick and conservative 100 megahertz core clock offset and a 600 megahertz memory clock offset on the GPU and then and only then where we finally ready to game actually we are ready to game we are now in present time let's jump into a freaking game so we're starting with doom here at 1920 by 1080 and if you look over here we are using the OpenGL API at ultra settings pretty ambitious for a $300 Frankenstein PC but let's see how it goes ok so there's no enemies here let me just run around in this empty room for a minute here so I'm not distracted so you can see that GPU utilization is hovering in the 80s and 90s not fully maxed out which I suppose is a good sign it means we're not completely at the end of our rope here CPU is also at around looks like about 80 80 % or so which is also fantastic it means that we're not bottlenecking on our CPU otherwise it would be closer to a hundred even our system memory is hanging in there eating up around 5 to 6 gigs of ddr3 and our frame rates are looking pretty darn strong in the 80 to 100 FPS range but let's let's go into a different environment here a different scene and see if things change you can see here that we're still getting around 80 fps and that's a you know prone fluctuate but it's looking pretty good here are our GPU is not being taxed to its fullest which means we even have a some additional headroom there notice the VRAM usage right now is about 3 gigs which is getting a little close to that 4 gig limit but we do still have some overhead there temperatures are looking pretty safe as well in the 70s oh I died actually it's more like in the high 60s hardly topping 70 C so that's not too bad either oh ok this is a good time to I'm gonna actually see what happens if we go up to 2560 by 1440 no promises here could very well suck completely alright ok we have definitely dropped our framerate as expected but hey still still in the 50s and 60s and still feeling very playable oh-ho-ho you can see our GPU is much closer to full utilization now that's actually going to take a little the stress off of our CPU as we become more GPU bound our VRAM usage hasn't really gone up much though it's still hovering around not a little over three gigs I'm really impressed that we're running this smoothly at 1440p without a hitch subjectively this is a great gaming experience and for the money it's a fantastic one I mean if someone told me that I was gaming on a thousand dollar PC right now there's nothing that I can see that would indicate otherwise I would completely believe them so overall I'm very happy with how this is looking so far well let's jump into another game Resident Evil 2 the remake 1920 by 1080 we're using a blend of high and actually just mostly high settings there's a quick gander there alright so it looks like we're getting pretty good frame rates here in the 80s and 90s but of course that's gonna change now we're seeing much different behavior here than we did in doom because if you look at our CPU utilization it's at 100 that's a CPU bottleneck so our GPU is writing checks that our CPU can't cache it's just working a little too fast for it so we are gonna suffer a little bit of performance there it's hard to say exactly how much but you can see our GPU is still doing some work you know it's not it's not sitting back chillaxing it's actually pretty close to 100% utilization at times as well we're pushing the boundaries a little bit more with our VRAM usage not by a whole lot I here at three point five gigs just a little bit of room to spare there and we still have plenty of system memory to go around oh hello liquor please don't oh geez okay this is why I bought the infinite rocket launchers I'd be off yeah how do you like it instead at 70 FPS died yep so that oh hello coach I didn't know you had a friend oh okay it's a quite a range here we've seen anywhere from 50 to 90 FPS depending on where we are the framerate in this game really goes down when you're in lighter environments because there's obviously more detail that needs to be rendered but still looking very strong Oh fancy seeing you here mr. X I didn't know you like to read yeah we should we should do a book club or something like that sometime oh what's that you're you're invincible but you can't jump over tables that's that's funny oh my god I love playing musical chairs too you know your footsteps are really loud for a library alright you're done buddy or is it sleepy time for mr. rags all right well mr. X is taking a break let's switch over to one last game oh god he's awake Altaf or tomb raider tomb raider her shadow is always on who whoa hey hey that's a choppy choppy scene let's let's let's change this here oh no wonder 1440p okay let's change that to 1920 by 1080 looks like directx12 is on and our graphics are on hi let's just see what hi looks like oh oh oh 30 FPS still despite lowering our resolution our frame rate has remained unchanged and look at that GPU utilization at 99% means we are definitely GPU bound heavily GPU bounder our CPUs just still kind of dancing around waiting for the GPU going what's going on graphics card what's going on 1650 I'm here for you I'm ready what's what's the holdup well these polygons are much harder to render than the last two games we played so I'm having a little bit of a time here chill out CPU we are pretty GPU bottlenecked at the moment so this is also a good example that the setup similar to this one may not be powerful enough to drive modern-day triple-a titles not all of them anyway at least at high settings let's see if we can get this more playable here let's drop you to low okay something a little bit more manageable around 45 fps okay not the greatest but definitely a lot smoother though because now we're dipping into the low 40s high 30s as opposed to in the 20s where things get super choppy it looks like our GPU is still pretty maxed out here so I think if we wanted a better chance at running modern triple-a titles with this system perhaps we should go for a faster graphics card something like a gtx 1660 for example but then you run into the potential issue of cpu bottlenecking if your GPUs too fast then the CPU can't keep up with it and it's kind of hard to know where that line is without testing it firsthand I think these last few playthroughs also demonstrate that the four gigs of video memory on this card are sufficient for 1080p gaming still here in 2019 at least for the majority of titles all right people let's let's have some closing words here let's break it down so overall I had an enjoyable time gaming with the gtx 1650 in this old system that's been seemingly resurrected as a gaming rig but we can't ignore the fact that the RX 570 from AMD is still the faster GPU and it's cheaper so it's it's roughly 5 to 10 percent faster in some of the benchmarks that I was looking at line and at the time of filming the lowest you can find a brand new rx 574 is a hundred and twenty nine us that's 20 dollars cheaper than the GTX 1650 and it's faster so it makes 100% sense if your power supply supports it to buy the rx 570 that essentially makes the GTX 1650 a last resort you don't buy the GTX 1650 because you want to you buy it because you have to it's kind of like if you had to build a computer but the only screwdriver you had was on a Swiss Army knife you'd be glad that you had the option but it wouldn't be your first choice certainly not one that you'd suggest for right out of the gate having said that if the conditions are appropriate the gtx 1650 today has shown that it can give your old system a new purpose as an entry level gaming PC and I'll leave it at that guys let me know what you think about it in the comments below and if you just want to see some straight good benchmarks on the gtx 1650 compared against other cards with graphs and all that i'll put some links to some other youtubers down below guys like steve from gamers nexus steve from hardware at box all the Steve's just follow all the Steve's and I'll add other links as I see them but that's gonna do for me guys thank you so much for watching this video toss a like cut before you go and get subscribe for more tech stuff coming at you really soon have a good one guys I will see you all in the next video