NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Launching on 26th March – Fast Enough To Tackle Radeon HD 7850

As you all may remember, we said in our reports that the AMD’s HD 7790 Bonaire GPU would be the direct competitor of the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost however turns out to be that even with the new core, its performance would lack far behind the updated GK106 core from NVIDIA. We will detail the performance bit later in this article.

[N0S3LFESTEEM]

That's the best looking 650ti I've seen but I'm nowhere close to being impressed by it. Everytime I see a reference 650ti a always think "Look at the baaaby"... though it is great for people without a lot of room to work with.
http://hothardware.com/arti...

[Information Minister]

The 1 GB version of the Radeon 7850 is still a better purchase in my opinion. These cards are arguably not powerful enough to populate 2GB of vram and I've seen the AMD card retail for just a little over $150. Besides, the Radeon's lower TDP and stock clock speeds provide more overclocking headroom, compared to the already factory overclocked GTX 650Ti.

I say go for the Radeon 7850 while it's still widely available. You might even be able to find it in clearance at some retailers.

[RedDeadLB]

I don't think so, but we will see.

The TDP is not really that much of a difference between these cards, it's low enough in both cases.

2GB VRAM is a bonus and even if the cards are not powerful enough to fully use it, modern games use quite a lot of memory (trust me, I'm still on a GTX 460 768mb and although it's still relatively powerful, you can feel the lack of memory bogging it down) so it's a more than welcome addition.

The GK106 chip is overclockable as well and with a 13% average performance lead of the 650ti Boost it's highly likely that both these cards, when overclocked, could go neck to neck. Now if only the price of the 650ti Boost is reasonable compared to the HD7850.. We'll see when the first benchmarks arrive.

[Information Minister]

You're missing the point. Those 13% average performance lead are already attributable to the factory overclock the GTX card comes out of the box with. The card requires more power and probably runs hotter than the Radeon 7850 as it is, you won't get the same overclocking headroom.

Current games only require more than 1GB vram above 1080p and it will probably remain that way until the next generation of consoles has been fully established. I've been using 1GB cards since 2007 (initially at 1680x1050, after that at 1920x1080) and still haven't felt the need to upgrade.

I used a GTX460 1GB for almost 2 years, which I only replaced because it started to malfunction due to heat damage (without overclocking!). I suspect the 192-bit memory interface is hurting performance a lot more than the amount of memory on your GTX460.

[RedDeadLB]

The benchmarks are out, the card is a killer, it's definitely a replacement for the now late 1GB HD7850. It uses a mere 12W more than the 7850 and with a modified fan profile on a REFERENCE design it overclocks to 1200MHz core with a load temperature of 56°C.