I have here in my hands Gigabyte’s new entry into the ~$140 GPU frey, the Kepler based Geforce GTX 650 OC Edition. It’s the 2GB flavor, which may help with huge textures at high resolutions. Or it may simply eat half your available system RAM if you’re on a 32bit OS. Keep that in mind!
Gigabyte of course is one of the top makers of GPUs and motherboards, they’re one of an increasingly small group of manufacturers that actually make their own boards. You can generally tell too, as they tend to have top notch quality.
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Nvidia’s Kepler architecture is either the best yet or the worst ever, depending on how you look at it. From the standpoint of performance/watt and not violating TDP they are fantastic. Tons of performance per watt, and simply do not violate TDP even if faced with furmark/etc. On the other hand, they aren’t the most overclockable things in the world as Nvidia has hard-locked a voltage cap on many of them and disabled voltage control all together on the rest. Mostly the people in the second category are extreme benchmarkers however, for the end users the new overclocking flavor is exceedingly easy and simple. From looking at the specs it looks like this card doesn’t have the Turbo Boost feature that forces all of the above, so it may be a more classic overclocking experience.
Speaking of the features, we should probably check them out!
