 This video is brought to you by CM Storm, preferred choice of mice, headsets, and mechanical keyboards of Curse Gaming. Visit www.coolermaster-usa.com slash team underscore curse for more details. Welcome to the Linus Tech Tips video review of the GTX 650 Ti Booster Juice... Boost Edition, excuse me, Boost Edition. So I actually think that this shouldn't even be called the GTX 650 Ti, because it is completely different from the other one. The similarities basically end at the fact that they both use PCI Express 3.0 ports, they both need one PCI Express 6-pin power connector, and they both support, like, DVI monitors, because that is pretty much it. The 650 Ti Boost Reference Card has a slightly longer PCB than the regular 650 Ti. You can see that right there. It also has the extension on here for the exhaust fan. So you can see it's using a much more similar style to the other GTX 600 series cards, with a rear exhaust that takes the heat out of your case, away from all the other components. It also, by reference, according to the reference design, supports 3 plus 1 display outputs, whereas only non-reference GTX 650 Ti's supported that. So you've got two DVIs, an HDMI, and a display port, whereas this guy's only got two DVIs and a mini HDMI. The cooler is much beefier. It does have an SLI finger, so you can support two-way SLI on this card, and the regular 650 Ti could not. It has a 192-bit memory bus compared to only 128. It is clocked at 6 GHz on the memory, and it has a 980 MHz core frequency versus only 925 on this card. But the real trick is the fact that it supports GPU boost. So it will achieve a typical GPU boost of over 1 GHz, around 1033, which makes it significantly faster than this card, but it also comes in at a significantly higher price. So it's targeting around 169 for the 2G model. That's another difference. This is a 1G card, natively. But there will be a 1G model following that's about $20 cheaper. So this is supposed to slot in, in between something like a 7770 or a 7790. We don't have a 7790 yet, but we'll be testing that soon. And a 7850 in terms of price point. So we're going to have a look at how performance shakes down pretty soon. In terms of the physical size of it, the reference card is 9.5 inches long, so you shouldn't have any trouble fitting it in any kind of gaming-oriented case, although it is not a small form factor builder's dream, like the regular 650 Ti, which is only about 6 inches long. So that extra 3 inches does make all the difference in the world. Without further ado, we're going to move into our performance numbers, starting with Far Cry... Oh no, test bench, test bench. So we're running our 3960X at 4 GHz with 16 gigs of HyperX RAM. All the cards we ran, we ran the 650 Ti, the 650 Ti Boost, the 660, the 7770, the 7850, and the 7870. These are the cards at and around that same price point. We used a Vertex 4 128 gig for our SSD. We have an Antec high-current Pro Platinum 1000 watt, and we're using a P9X79 Deluxe motherboard from ASUS. Now, as always, all of our cards are overclocked. If you want to see our overclocking settings, you can check them out in the link in the video description. You can see what we're running at. We're aiming for over clocks that you guys can easily achieve with your cards at home, so we're not pushing them to the absolute limit. In terms of drivers, we're using the latest Nvidia driver, so we have an unreleased driver for the Nvidia cards, and we have AMD's 13.1 driver because obviously we don't have an unreleased driver for the AMD cards because they're all the ones we're testing are released. So let's start with Far Cry 3. Here we see the 7870 and the 7850 topping the charts, with the 660 coming in a little bit below the 7850, pretty much the same. It's within margin of error. And then the 650 Ti Boost actually putting up a really good showing, and this backs up what I was saying about the 650 Ti Boost really not actually being a 650 Ti at all. It is closer to a 660 in terms of performance than it is to a 650 Ti. Both the 650 Ti and the 7770 dropped enormously in terms of the minimum frame rates in this game, demonstrating that one gig of video memory is not enough for modern gaming at 1080p. So I would only really suggest playing Far Cry 3 on either of those two cards on a 1680 by 1050 monitor or lower. In Crysis 3, we see the same story except that the GTX 660, which is on the test bench right now here, wins this one, but again within margin of error against the 7870. The 7850 put up a really good showing, only performing 10% worse than the 7870, with the 650 Ti Boost less than 10% away from the 7850 in spite of the price differential. The 650 Ti again just choked in this game compared to the 650 Ti Boost, performing about 65% as well as the 650 Ti Boost. So you are getting a lot of extra performance for that extra 40 bucks. The 7870... oh, in The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim, we are running our sort of modded game with about 18 mods. So your performance may vary in this game, however we will be producing a benchmarking guide for this game pretty soon, so stay tuned for that. Our 7870 and 7850 did top the charts in this one, with our 660 and our 650 Ti Boost coming very close to each other, only about 5% away from each other in terms of performance, with the 650 Ti and the 7770 bringing up the rear once again as the less expensive cards, this does make sense. In The Witcher 2, we are running with uber sampling and anti-aliasing disabled, and the Radeon cards do come out ahead bearing in mind of course that they are more expensive, with the 660 only leading the 650 Ti Boost by about 10% and then the 7770 and the 650 Ti again bringing up the rear. We are seeing some pretty good consistency to the results here, which means that Nvidia has done a good job of pricing the 650 Ti Boost correctly according to the rest of the market. The 2 gigs of RAM to me is a huge selling point compared to the recently released 7790, although we haven't tested it yet, so bear that in mind, we will have a review of that coming soon, and we are going to include these numbers in there as well. So in Metro 2033, the 7870 comes out on top, followed by the 660, which is in a very tight pack with the 7850 and the 650 Ti Boost. It's actually pretty good to see how close the 650 Ti Boost gets to the 7850, considering that there is a price differential there, making this one of the most cost-effective 2 gig cards and actually suitable for 1080p gaming, because again, in Metro 2033, both our 7770 and our 650 Ti, which are our 1 gig cards, put up pretty decent average frame rates and maximum frame rates, but their minimum frame rates were less than half of the average frame rates, meaning they ran out of video memory buffer at some point during our testing and absolutely choked in terms of performance. So while this is a review of the 650 Ti Boost, I am looking at it as almost more of an examination of how much memory we actually need for modern gaming. So the two games, Far Cry 3 and Metro 2033, that really choked on the 1 gig cards, demonstrate that 2 gigs is what we need for 1080p gaming. However, just because the card supports 3 plus 1 in Nvidia Surround with an auxiliary display, doesn't mean you're going to be playing any AAA current-gen titles at 3x1080p resolution. You want to do something like that, you got to step up to a bigger card. It's nice to see those features from a productivity standpoint on the card, but, you know, guys, make sure your expectations are realistic. Thank you for checking out this video review of the 650 Ti Boost from Nvidia. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.