At a Glance: Zotac GeForce GTX 1650 Super Twin Fan Review

Nvidia has made a hobby out of super-sizing its graphics cards to provide more performance. The latest card to get this treatment is the company’s GTX 1650, which gains the expected boost in performance, but picks up a bit of cost.

Specs

The GeForce GTX 1650 Super features a larger graphics processor than the vanilla GeForce GTX 1650. With roughly 6.6 billion transistors and 1,280 CUDA cores, the GTX 1650 Super has roughly 42 percent more execution resources than the old GTX 1650. Nvidia also switched the new card to GDDR6, which gives it a 50 percent boost in bandwidth.

All this extra hardware pushes the card’s power requirement up to 100W. This, unfortunately, means the card cannot be powered exclusively by the motherboard’s PCI-E slot. Equipped with a 6-pin PCI-E power connector, the card can access up to 150W of juice. On the bright side, this also will give the card plenty of extra room in the power budget for overclocking.

Our sister site PCMag tested the Zotac card against several other competing models. Zotac’s GeForce GTX 1650 Super Twin Fan card utilizes a relatively short PCB and a dual-fan thermal solution.

Benchmarks

The new GeForce GTX 1650 Super is lined up to compete with several cars including AMD’s aged yet capable RX 570 and RX 580 graphics cards. The main competitor here though is AMD’s just-released Radeon RX 5500 XT. Nvidia clearly sought to undermine the Radeon RX 5500 XT by releasing the GTX 1650 Super $10 below the RX 5500 XT’s launch price.

Testing the GeForce GTX 1650 Super with 3DMark Fire Strike returned disappointing results. Although this graphics card managed to beat out Zotac’s plain old GeForce GTX 1650 OC, it didn’t come close to matching the competition.

The Zotac GeForce GTX 1650 Super Twin Fan performed better in Unigine’s Superposition 1.0 test and it appears to more accurately reflect the card’s performance.

In real-world game tests, we see similar results as in the Superposition test. The card appears to perform exceptionally well when gaming at 2K and the performance gap between it and faster cards such as the GeForce GTX 1660 OC drops significantly at this resolution.

Overclocking

After running these benchmarks, PCMag also tried their hand at overclocking Zotac’s GeForce GTX 1650 Super Twin Fan graphics card. With a bit of work, PCMag was able to stabilize the card with an increase of 225MHz on the GPU core and an extra 350MHz on the VRAM. This resulted in roughly an 11 percent boost in performance in Far Cry 5.

Conclusion

Nvidia set the GeForce GTX 1650 Super with an MSRP of $159, which is just $10 above the vanilla GeForce GTX 1650. For this minuscule increase in price, the GeForce GTX 1650 Super offers an enormous increase in performance.

It’s also notable that the GeForce GTX 1650 Super is highly competitive against AMD’s Radeon RX 5500 XT. The two trade places in benchmarks with neither really gaining a clear upper hand. This makes it difficult to really recommend one card over the other, and for best results, you should look at more game benchmarks to decide which runs the games you like best.

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