Last year NVIDIA delivered the GTX 650Ti to provide a product for gamers that wanted to play the latest games but did not necessarily want to break the bank to do it. For that there is the GTX 690 and just released GTX Titan. The GTX 650Ti, meanwhile, proved to be capable of playing the latest DirectX 11 games with some of the eye candy on at a really attractive $150 price point. This made it an attractive upgrade path for those users stuck in older hardware not capable of meeting the needs of games running in a DX 11 environment.

It seems that NVIDIA had something planned to offset the launch of the HD 7790 even though the main competition for the GTX 650Ti Boost is the HD 7850. As a performance gateway card the $169 GTX 650Ti Boost delivers more than adequate performance for that price. As it sits, many of the non-reference HD 7790's were priced in the $159 range; just $10 less than the GTX 650 Ti Boost. For that $10 you get a card in the GTX 650Ti Boost that has an additional 1GB of frame buffer, higher clock speeds, and a significant upswing in raw gaming performance over the HD 7790. If you need more performance you can always add in another card to run a pair in an SLI configuration.

If another card is going to break the budget this version of the Kepler architecture is just as strong as its more capable siblings when it comes time to raise the clock speeds. In this case I was able to increase the boost clock speeds on the GK106 core to 1215MHz and the 2GB of GDDR5 memory was able to run at just over 1600MHz. You can look at overclocking as free FPS with this card as it was easily able to run at 1215MHz all day long.

Finding the right visual quality settings to maximize game performance is a balancing act that can take some time to get right. My testing involves running specific settings rather to compare each card based on the same settings. These may not always be optimal for each game. However NVIDIA has launched its GeForce Experience that has proven configurations for just about every game so that you can get the best gameplay experience with a GeForce GPU. NVIDIA is sweetening the pot when you pick up one of its new GTX 650Ti Boost edition cards with $75 toward in-game gear in Hawken, Planetside 2, and World of Tanks.

With this new addition to the product stack, NVIDIA is keeping the old GTX 650Ti and reducing the price to around $114 with some non-reference cards priced slightly higher after rebates. By adding in the Boost clock feature and increasing the memory size and bus width, NVIDIA has put together a card that offers a massive boost in gaming performance over the previous incarnation of the card. You get FPS performance at 1080p with high settings that truly is playable, eliminating the need to ratchet down the quality settings just to get a playable frame rate. The opening price for the GTX 650Ti Boost of $169 is a fair price to pay for the performance it delivers.

 
Pros:
    Great 1080p performance
    Overclocking
    PhysX
    TXAA
    SLI Support
    GeForce Experience
    $75 worth of  in-game gear
 
Cons:
    Power consumption