Gadgetory


All Cool Mind-blowing Gadgets You Love in One Place

Testing the GTX 1650 Without PCIe Power, Still Pointless at 75W?

2019-04-25
welcome back to harbor unboxed now yesterday I checked out the new geforce gtx 1650 for the first time and i was very disappointed with what i found for some time now AMD's Radeon rx 570 has been or at least should have been the go-to option for budget-conscious gamers it absolutely obliterates in videos gtx 1050 TI and it's been the cheaper of the two to buy ever since the cryptocurrency mining boom thing cooled off so the radio rx 570 really is a great value gaming graphics card but as great as it is I was really hoping that we'd be getting a cheering bass GPU that was even better especially having waited all these years sadly though that didn't happen the GTX 1650 struggles to ever match the value of the much faster rx 580 the only possible advantage the gtx 1650 has is its power efficiency it might not be the fastest thing going around but it does sit power and using less power means cooler and quieter graphics cards or at least it can in this case though I suspect it means bigger profit margins for AIB partners as they can get away with slapping a crushed coke can on the thing and will still run at 70 degrees still the GTX 1650s that I've seen so far do run cool and quiet despite their unimpressive looking coolers the other advantage to not using much power is well not using much power and that means the GTX 1650 doesn't require an external power connector at least this one that I've purchased doesn't unfortunately though the models provided by MSI and gigabyte for review did require external six pin power connectors and this does place them in direct competition with something like the cheaper and faster Radeon rx 570 so with the help of our lovely patreon backers I have purchased the gigabyte GTX 1650 OC this one is a hundred and ninety five millimeters long so it's quite a short graphics card and at way is just 377 grams so extremely light for a graphics card and yeah I mean you guys can see how small it is and not a particularly large aluminium heatsink but most crucially the reason why I have purchased this graphics card because it doesn't have an external PCI Express power connector there's no 6-pin pci e power connector on this card as you can see so it is limited to 75 watts anyway for a bit of context I suppose we do have the well that stand up for me not really we do have the carlo used in my day 1.5 content so that is the gigabyte gaming OC version now this graphics card as you can see is significantly larger it's much bigger they're both dual slot cards but this one's just longer and much heavier it is something like 36 percent longer and it is 76% heavier so much more substantial cooler on this thing and yeah just a bigger beefier card but as you can see it has a 6 pin connector so it can run above the 75 watt spec in terms of pricing the smaller version without the 6 pin PCI power connector costs one hundred and fifty five dollars u.s. so that's only five dollars over the MSRP the gaming OC version note that I used for my initial testing that one costs $180 us and does require 6 pin PCI power so it's 16% more expensive out of the box the base model targets a boost clock speed of 1700 and 10 megahertz while the bigger version aims for 1800 and 15 megahertz when gaming the base model typically boosted to 830 megahertz while the 6 pin model hit nineteen hundred and fifty megahertz meaning it was clocking seven percent higher and that's a reasonably large difference because the base model is limited to the 75 watt power delivery of the PCI Express x 16 slot it can't clock higher as it would be running out of spec and doing so could risk damage to the motherboard therefore out of the box we saw a pic GPU load of 67 watts whereas the gaming OSI model hits 72 watts given the limitations overclocking the base model isn't really possible the cards power limit is locked to 100% and at most I was only able to squeeze another 15 mega Hertz out of the cause and even that was a little iffy pushing the GPU load to 69 watts however I quickly discovered the gtx 1650 is extremely memory bound so if you spend the small power budget available on the 75 watt model by overclocking the four gigabytes of gddr5 memory this does Lee to reasonably impressive gains I was able to boost their memory frequency by 17 percent as you're about to see that did lead to some fairly impressive performance gains that said though the 6-pin models overclocked a much better and again we'll look at those results in a moment overclocked the GPU on the gigabyte gtx 1650 gaming OC picked at 91 watts an average turn operating frequency of two thousand and seventy megahertz which was really quite impressive for testing I have just a few games and then the usual test systems been used which includes a kora 999 reco clocked at five years with 32 gigabytes of ddr4 3,200 memory ok let's get into the results first up we have World War Z and here out of the box the performance between the two gigabyte gtx 1650 models is basically identical which might seem a bit odd at first given the 16 model is clocked 6 to 7 percent higher however as I mentioned earlier the gtx 1650 is very memory bound so much so that you have to really under cloak the core quite heavily before you see a noticeable decline in performance leaving the core frequency untouched but boosting the gddr5 memory frequency by 18 percent improve frame rates in World War Z by 7 percent certainly not an amazing overclock from the base model but I did try to overclock the cause and that only saw a one to two percent increase so overclocking the memory is certainly the way to go the 6 pin model did support core and memory overclocking and the memory went a little further they saw a 12 percent boost in performance placing the gtx 1650 just behind a stock gtx 1063 gigabyte not exactly an impressive result by overall but this is about the best you can hope for from a gtx 1650 and World War Z performance gains when testing with far cry new dorm were quite similar the base model was 7% faster once overclocked while the 6 pin model was 14% faster again another nice performance uplift for the 6 pin model but even so it was slower than the stock 3 about 1060 and much slower than a stock Radeon rx 570 we know force a horizon fought to be quite a memory sensitive title and therefore I wasn't overly surprised to see the memory overclock on the base model providing a 13% performance boost which was comparable to the 15% performance boost of the 6 pin model gain seen in fortnight are reminiscent of what we just saw in World War and far cry new dawn and 8% boost for the base model and 13% for the 6-pin version then finally we have Resident Evil 2 and here we see a slight performance advantage out of the box with a 6 p.m. model and then once overclocked it enjoyed a 17 percent performance bump and then 10% for the base model well I have to admit I am pleasantly surprised by this 75 watt model the version that lacks the 6 pin PCI Express power connector I had thought it would be worse than it was but yeah I mean it's not a particularly good graphics card but like I said I was expecting it to be worse than it was so that is noticeably worse than this card but yeah didn't turn out to be the case to be fair though this is the best or one of the best 75 watt models you can get your hands on it is running right on the edge there right up to the edge of the power limit so there's just absolutely no Headroom there for the cause though it is only clocked something like 3% above the official Nvidia spec so it's not like the really base base models are going to be a whole lot slower so yeah I think it's fair to say you can buy any 1650 and get pretty similar performance to what we showed in our day 1.5 review so the takeaway here is if you're after a GTX 1650 and let's not get into reasons if you're after a GTX 1650 then your best bet is a base model at or as close to the MSRP as you can get in my opinion the gigabyte gaming OC is a much better graphics card than the base model OC version but it's certainly not worth paying more than a $10 premium for so at around $30 more it is a hard pass of course it is my opinion of the gtx 1650 series in itself as a hard pass because for $20 less shaking at an RX 570 which is overall a faster graphics card and in most modern titles much faster think something like 20% and yeah the RX 570 it does suck down way more power which certainly is an ideal but base model RX 570 is way around 700 grams so they're still quite cool and quiet but getting back to the gtx 1650 if you're a mad scientist that overclocked a gaming chair then there's more fun to be had with two 6-pin models and you can get them for as little as 160 dollars u.s. and I say that relative to the MSRP so that's just ten dollars over the MSRP so I guess in an alternative universe with the gtx 1650 is actually worth buying i'd buy one of these models i'd spend a little bit more to get a six pin power connector because yeah you can have a bit more fun overclocking it sorry that brings me to the end of this video but don't despair I've got more gtx 1650 content planned yeah he says everybody no but seriously I do want to look into this whole PCIe power cable debate a shocking number of people are arguing the GTX 1650 is worthwhile and that it's even a great graphics card because models such as this one don't require external power they can be used in cheap OAM systems because of that and it just makes them sort of a cost-effective upgrade at least that is the argument thing is I can't really find those systems at least ones that would warrant throwing in a hundred and fifty dollar US graphics card so if you guys can please post some candidate systems below in the comments that would be really helpful of the more information the better and I'll look into buying those pcs or at least seeing how viable they are or how viable this is as an upgrade for those pcs I've already discussed this with our patreon community on discord and they seem to think the whole PCIe power cable this thing is a bit of a crock these days one member dug up the Dell Precision T 1600 workstation with a core i7 2670 Vasek spin PCIe power connector and there doesn't appear to be any spare 4-pin molex cables to use with an adapter thing is though with very very basic PC building skills you can remove that dumpster fire for PSU within like five minutes and then replace it with a quality 450 to 500 watt model for around $35 u.s. thrown in our x5 70 yeah you've spent fifteen dollars more than a GTX 1650 but you've got a significantly better gaming graphics card that will no doubt age considerably better and since you're obviously a bit of a tight-ass that'll mean big points for the radio and GPU anyway I think that will do it for this one I would like to just quickly note that I did buy this gigabyte graphics card and I have nothing against gigabyte so I hate to use them in sort of- ish content i mean it's not super negative but I just don't see a point to these graphics cards and yeah until I can prove that they do have a point yeah I'm gonna stick to my opinion frankly $150 us these are mainstream graphics cards meant for mainstream gaming and that doesn't mean people using ten-year-old computers but anyway apparently it does so we will look into that in a separate piece of content but I would like to just say thank you to gigabyte for providing this card and the the gtx 1660 which was a fantastic product the 1660 ti also fantastic and the ITX 2060 also quite a fantastic product and gigabyte 1660 cards were the best value options I found they provided dual fan cards at pretty much MSRP prices whereas competitors such as a soos and maybe even an MS I didn't and this particular model was better than the MSI gaming X in terms of operating temperature operating volume and all that sort of stuff and overclocked a little bit better as well so yeah I hate to throw a gigabyte in the firing line on this one if I have appreciate them setting out cards and yeah they do make quality cards they just can't do too much about the gtx 1650 kind of sucking in terms of cost per frame and well that's something else i'll discuss in an upcoming video as well I really want to do a replying to comments episode on my review of the 1650 because there's some absolute parallel is there that I would like to address but anyway we'll do that in a separate video soon because I haven't done a replying to comments for a while and I think yeah we've got plenty of material to work with you know 1650 review but anyway apologies to gigabyte if required and yeah I think that's probably all I need to say but anyway if you did enjoy the video be sure to the like button subscribe for more content and if you appreciate the work we do her on box where we buy graphics cards actual retail cards so he can see what's going on in different situations then yeah you can support us on patreon because that allows us to do that and you also get some really awesome perks like you become a member of our really cool discord community you get to see our livestream is behind the same videos and yeah some other cool stuff anyway thank you for watching I am your host Steve and I will see you again next time man
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.