ZOTAC GAMING GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER Twin Fan Review

NVIDIA introduced their Turing GPU architecture last year, making a complete departure from traditional GPU designs and creating a hybrid architecture that would include a range of new technologies to power the next-generation immersive gaming experiences.

While initially announced with Quadro lineup under the new Quadro RTX brand, we all knew that the Turing architecture was coming to the GeForce lineup. It arrived in the GeForce lineup a few months later under the new GeForce RTX branding. NVIDIA's first big naming departure for two decades of GeForce GTX.

The GeForce RTX 20 series was the enablement of real-time raytracing which is the holy grail of graphics and something NVIDIA spent 10 years to perfect. In addition to raytracing, NVIDIA also aims to place bets on AI which will play a key role in powering features such as DLSS or Deep Learning Super Sampling, a unique way of offering the same quality as the more taxing MSAA AA techniques at twice the performance.

NVIDIA has announced for cards under the GeForce RTX 20 series family, the flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, the Enthusiast GeForce RTX 2080, the high-performance GeForce RTX 2070 and the main-stream GeForce RTX 2060. Now, NVIDIA is looking to offer Turing for more reasonable prices, so is also going back to the good old GeForce GTX branding and for good reasons. While GeForce RTX and GeForce GTX will exist alongside each other in this generation, the GeForce GTX lineup as the name suggests would be aiming for raw performance over the graphics intensive RTX features which only the RTX cards support.

A few months back, I got to take a look at the new GeForce 16 series cards based on the Turing GPU architecture, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and the GeForce GTX 1660. Today NVIDIA has finally unveiled that they aren't just supercharging the GeForce RTX lineup but also the GeForce GTX line up. NVIDIA introduced the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER first which I tested here but today, I will be taking a look at the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER, a $159 US graphics card which completely replaces the GeForce GTX 1650 and offers the biggest performance jump we have seen yet on a SUPER series graphics card.

When it comes to pricing, the GeForce RTX 20 series are some of the most costly cards NVIDIA has offered to consumers. The GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER replaces the GTX 1050, promising far better performance than the GTX 1060 around $150 US. The GeForce GTX 16 SUPER series would also continue the trend of introducing a higher performance out of the box at the same price tag. Following is the current per segment price structure of the entire NVIDIA Turing lineup compared to its predecessors.

NVIDIA GeForce GPU Segment/Tier Prices

Graphics Segment	2014-2015	2015-2016	2016-2017	2017-2018	2018-2019
Titan Tier	Titan X (Maxwell)	Titan X (Pascal)	Titan Xp (Pascal)	Titan V (Volta)	Titan RTX (Turing)
Price	$999 US	$1199 US	$1199 US	$2999 US	$2499 US
Ultra Enthusiast Tier	GeForce GTX 980 Ti	GeForce GTX 980 Ti	GeForce GTX 1080 Ti	GeForce RTX 2080 Ti	GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
Price	$649 US	$649 US	$699 US	$999 US	$999 US
Enthusiast Tier	GeForce GTX 980	GeForce GTX 1080	GeForce GTX 1080	GeForce RTX 2080	GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER
Price	$549 US	$549 US	$549 US	$699 US	$699 US
High-End Tier	GeForce GTX 970	GeForce GTX 1070	GeForce GTX 1070	GeForce RTX 2070	GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER
Price	$329 US	$379 US	$379 US	$499 US	$499 US
Mainstream Tier	GeForce GTX 960	GeForce GTX 1060	GeForce GTX 1060	GeForce GTX 1060	GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER GeForce RTX 2060 GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER GeForce GTX 1660
Price	$199 US	$249 US	$249 US	$249 US	$399 US $349 US $279 US $229 US $219 US
Entry Tier	GTX 750 Ti GTX 750	GTX 950	GTX 1050 Ti GTX 1050	GTX 1050 Ti GTX 1050	GTX 1650 SUPER GTX 1650
Price	$149 US $119 US	$149 US	$139 US $109 US	$139 US $109 US	$159 US $149 US

For this review, I will be taking a look at Zotac's  Zotac Gaming GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER Twin Fan, a compact custom graphics card that will retail at $159 US. The reference card will be priced at $159 US so we are looking at a fairly reference performing version of the GTX 1650, if you want to see a premium overclocked version of the card check out the MSI Gaming X version review.

The main barrier with overclocking on Turing GPUs is by far the power limit and those that offer the highest power limits out of the box are generally the ones with the best overclocking potential and performance output.

In case you want to read our full NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture and RTX/DLSS features deep dive, head over to this link.

While we have already detailed the Turing GPU architecture, it should be pointed out that the TU116 GPU, while it shares the same DNA as the Turing architecture has some big changes to what've seen on the GeForce RTX 20 series cards.

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Based on the 12th Generation Turing GPU architecture, the TU116 GPU found on the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER, GeForce GTX 1660 and the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER features the same shader innovations that were introduced on Turing but to balance it out in terms of power, cost and performance, a few adjustments had to be made. This is done through the exclusion of RT cores and Tensor cores on the GeForce GTX cards with Turing architecture. It is pointed out that the Turing architecture on GeForce GTX still delivers improved performance & better efficiency compared to its predecessor while supporting concurrent floating-point and integer Ops.

So let's talk about the balanced architecture design of the Turing TU116 and how it still manages to improve upon its Pascal-based predecessors. The first thing to mention is the three big changes in the Turing SM. The revamped structure of the Turing TU116 SM enables the processing of FP32 & INT operations concurrently through the use of dedicated cores within the SM. The list of features that Turing TU116 GPU adds over Pascal GP106 include:

• Concurrent FP and INT operations
• Variable Rate Shading
• Unified Cache Architecture
• GDDR6 Memory Subsystem
• Dedicated FP16 Cores
• Turing NVENC Support

The Turing SM can also perform FP16 operations at double the rate of FP32. The Turing TU116 GPU is rated at 11 TOPs (FP+INT), 11 TFLOPs FP16 and an improved bandwidth that is resultant of the higher cache size of 1.5 MB compared to just 480 KB on the Pascal GP106 GPU.

If we look at some modern gaming titles, then we can see that developers are widely mixing floating-point operations with integer instructions. For every 100 instructions in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, for example, 62 are floating point and 38 integers, on average. In previous GPUs, the floating-point math datapath in the SM would sit idly whenever one of these non-FP-math runs.

Turing adds a second parallel Integer execution unit never to ever CUDA core that executes these instructions in parallel with floating-point math. This would allow the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER graphics card to deliver up to 2.0x performance improvement over the GeForce GTX 1050 4 GB.

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Now coming to the raw specifications of the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER graphics card. The TU116 GPU is fabricated on the TSMC's 12nm FFN (FinFET NVIDIA) process node. It features 3 GPCs, 12 TPCs, and 20 Turing SMs. Each SM contains 64 cores which equal to a total of 1280 CUDA Cores. There are also 80 Texture Units and 32 Raster Operation Units on the card. The base clock is maintained at 1530 MHz while the boost clock is maintained at 1725 MHz. That's a massive GPU configuration difference versus the GeForce GTX 1650 which was based on the TU117 GPU core.

The card features 4 GB of GDDR6 VRAM running on a 128-bit bus interface. The memory system would be clocked at 12.0 Gbps delivering an effective bandwidth of 192 GB/s. The card features a single 6 pin connector to boot and has a TDP of 100W. Display outputs include a single DisplayPort, a single DVI-D, and an HDMI connector.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX/GTX "Turing" Family:

Graphics Card Name	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
GPU Architecture	Turing GPU (TU117)	Turing GPU (TU116)	Turing GPU (TU116)	Turing GPU (TU116)	Turing GPU (TU106)	Turing GPU (TU106)	Turing GPU (TU104)	Turing GPU (TU102)
Process	12nm FNN	12nm FNN	12nm FNN	12nm FNN	12nm FNN	12nm FNN	12nm FNN	12nm FNN
Die Size	200mm2	284mm2	284mm2	284mm2	445mm2	445mm2	545mm2	754mm2
Transistors	4.7 Billion	6.6 Billion	6.6 Billion	6.6 Billion	10.6 Billion	10.6 Billion	13.6 Billion	18.6 Billion
CUDA Cores	896 Cores	1408 Cores	1408 Cores	1536 Cores	1920 Cores	2304 Cores	2944 Cores	4352 Cores
TMUs/ROPs	56/32	88/48	88/48	96/48	120/48	144/64	192/64	288/96
GigaRays	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	5 Giga Rays/s	6 Giga Rays/s	8 Giga Rays/s	10 Giga Rays/s
Cache	1.5 MB L2 Cache	1.5 MB L2 Cache	1.5 MB L2 Cache	1.5 MB L2 Cache	4 MB L2 Cache	4 MB L2 Cache	4 MB L2 Cache	6 MB L2 Cache
Base Clock	1485 MHz	1530 MHz	1530 MHz	1500 MHz	1365 MHz	1410 MHz	1515 MHz	1350 MHz
Boost Clock	1665 MHz	1785 MHz	1785 MHz	1770 MHz	1680 MHz	1620 MHz 1710 MHz OC	1710 MHz 1800 MHz OC	1545 MHz 1635 MHz OC
Compute	3.0 TFLOPs	5.0 TFLOPs	5.0 TFLOPs	5.5 TFLOPs	6.5 TFLOPs	7.5 TFLOPs	10.1 TFLOPs	13.4 TFLOPs
Memory	Up To 4 GB GDDR5	Up To 6 GB GDDR5	Up To 6 GB GDDR6	Up To 6 GB GDDR6	Up To 6 GB GDDR6	Up To 8 GB GDDR6	Up To 8 GB GDDR6	Up To 11 GB GDDR6
Memory Speed	8.00 Gbps	8.00 Gbps	14.00 Gbps	12.00 Gbps	14.00 Gbps	14.00 Gbps	14.00 Gbps	14.00 Gbps
Memory Interface	128-bit	192-bit	192-bit	192-bit	192-bit	256-bit	256-bit	352-bit
Memory Bandwidth	128 GB/s	192 GB/s	336 GB/s	288 GB/s	336 GB/s	448 GB/s	448 GB/s	616 GB/s
Power Connectors	N/A	8 Pin	8 Pin	8 Pin	8 Pin	8 Pin	8+8 Pin	8+8 Pin
TDP	75W	120W	125W	120W	160W	185W (Founders) 175W (Reference)	225W (Founders) 215W (Reference)	260W (Founders) 250W (Reference)
Starting Price	$149 US	$219 US	$229 US	$279 US	$349 US	$499 US	$699 US	$999 US
Price (Founders Edition)	$149 US	$219 US	$229 US	$279 US	$349 US	$599 US	$799 US	$1,199 US
Launch	April 2019	March 2019	October 2019	February 2019	January 2019	October 2018	September 2018	September 2018

The card that ZOTAC made is an adorable little guy that promises to pack a punch and be compatible, at least sizewise with 99% of builds on the market.  Coming in at a staggering 6.24in long and 4.54in wide but still taking up the same height of a typical two-slot card the GTX 1650 SUPER Twin Fan is only slightly longer than the vanilla ZOTAC Gaming GeForce GTX 1650 OC, but offers much more in terms of specifications.

• TU-116 Die
• 1280 CUDA Cores
• Boost up to 1725MHz (Typically stayed ~1825MHz)
• 4GB GDDR6 12GBs on 128 bit-bus resulting in 196GB/s memory bandwidth
• Display port 1.4, HDMI 2.0, Dual Link DVI-D
• Single 6-pin

Swinging around the card we see there really isn't a whole lot going on as far as design goes. We have the three video output connections on the rear I/O. Two fans adorn a plastic shroud that covers the all aluminum finned heasink that sits on the TU116 die. There is no backplate on this model. The single 6-pin PCIe power plug connects to the rear of the card similar to the RTX 2060 and that's about it.

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Since this card will remain in our testing suite for future games we had the opportunity to rip the cooler off and see what is all underneath. The ZOTAC Gaming GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER is sporting the cut down TU116 die that we see in the 1660 Series of cads but with two of the memory modules missing. Power is handled by a 3+1 phase design that is not only capable of handling the GPU and memory at stock but can handle a decent overclock as well.

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I wanted to take a moment and mention the aluminum chunk that is attached to the die as well as the dedicated and separate heatsink for the VRMs as well. When you get to the thermal results you'll see that this cooler is capable of keeping the GPU in check and didn't really warrant something beefier, although looking at other results from bigger and better cooler equipped cards you can see that this could have gone a bit better.

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All of the testings were done on our Intel Z370 test bench powered by a 5GHz Core i9-9900K. We ran all tests involving DX11 through 3 paces and averaged the results of all metrics to come to the final numbers. For DX12 and Vulkan we used the latest release of FrameView at the time.  I took the average of average frame rates as well as the 99th percentile results from the run.  I had been using 1% and .1% results but while working on an upcoming review, before starting this one, I had decided to move to a 99th percentile to represent the bottom end of the framerates for a more simple method of charting and reading for our readers.  For those uncertain of what the 99th percentile is representing is easily explained as showing only 1 frame out of 100 is slower than this frame rate. Put another way, 99% of the frames will achieve at least this frame rate. The representation of the 99th percentile is much more consistent in experience than the 1% and .1% lows, and this was ultimately done as a way to deliver better metrics to the audience.

Test System

Components	Z370
CPU	Intel Core i9-9900k @ 5GHz
Memory	16GB G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 3200
Motherboard	EVGA Z370 Classified K
Storage	Kingston KC2000 1TB NVMe SSD
PSU	Cooler Master V1200 Platinum
Windows Version	1903 with latest security patches

Graphics Cards Tested

GPU	Architecture	Core Count	Clock Speed	Memory Capacity	Memory Speed
Zotac GTX 1650 SUPER	Turing	1280	1530/1725	4GB GDDR6	12Gbps
NVIDIA GTX 1060 FE 6GB	Pascal	1280	1506/1708	6GB GDDR5	8Gbps
MSI RX 580 Armor 8GB	Polaris 20	2304	1366	8GB GDDR5	8Gbps
Sapphire Nitro+ RX 570 4GB	Polaris 20	2048	1340	4GB GDDR5	7Gbps
Zotac GTX 1650 OC	Turing	896	1485/1665	4GB GDDR5	8Gbps

Drivers Used

Drivers
Radeon Settings	19.11.1
GeForce	441.20

Firestrike

Firestrike is running the DX11 API and is still a good measure of GPU scaling performance, in this test we ran the regular version of Firestrike which runs at 1080p and we recorded the Graphics Score only as the Physics and combined are not pertinent to this review.

Time Spy

Time Spy is running the DX12 API and we used it in the same manner as Firestrike Extreme where we only recorded the Graphics Score as the Physics score is recording the CPU performance and isn't important to the testing we are doing here.

Thermals

Thermals were measured from our open test bench after running the Time Spy graphics test 2 on loop for 30 minutes recording the highest temperatures reported. The room was climate controlled and kept at a constant 22c throughout the testing.

Power Draw
Power draw numbers were taken from the total system power draw by measuring with a Kill-A-Watt. We ran Unigine Valley for 30 minutes and observed the highest sustained load. Something to keep in mind when observing total system power draw is that there are times where a GPU simply being faster and requiring more from the CPU can cause the total system power draw to increase with the like of the Core i9-9900K. That said, the total system power draw is still important as it is how much power it is taking to run the system.

Forza Horizon 4

Forza Horizon 4 carries on the open-world racing tradition of the Horizon series.  The latest DX12 powered entry is beautifully crafted and amazingly well executed and is a great showcase of DX12 games.  We use the benchmark run while having all of the settings set to non-dynamic with an uncapped framerate to gather these results.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider, unlike its predecessor, does a good job putting DX12 to use and results in higher performance than the DX11 counterpart in this title and because of that, we test this title in DX12.  I do use the second segment of the benchmark run to gather these numbers as it is more indicative of in-game scenarios where the foliage is heavy.

Rainbow 6 Siege

Rainbow 6 Siege has maintained a massive following since its launch and it consistently in Steams Top Ten highest player count game.  In a title where the higher the framerate the better in a tactical yet fast-paced competitive landscape is essential, we include this title despite its ludicrously high framerates.  We use the Ultra preset with the High Defenition Texture Pack as well and gather our results from the built-in benchmarking tool.

Far Cry New Dawn

Far Cry New Dawn brings the DX11 powered Dunia 2 engine back for another beating in Hope County.  We test this game using the Ultra Preset and follow the built-in benchmarking tool for consistency's sake.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint

Ghost Recon Breakpoint sees a return of the DX11 powered Anvil Next Engine and does a wonderful job beating the daylights out of modern hardware.  Because of this, we run the game at the High preset.  We take our measurements from the built-in benchmarking tool

Red Dead Redemption 2

Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the biggest release titles of the year on PC and we simply have to include results here. Running on the Vulkan version of the Rockstar Advanced Graphics Engine we manually set all of the graphics settings and sliders to the Medium setting and left anti-aliasing disabled. We took our results from the final 2 minute section of the built-in benchmark tool.

Metro Exodus

The Metro series is no stranger to being difficult to run and Metro Exodus is no different.  This time it was built with DX12 in mind first and foremost. We take our readings from the Volga mission from one side of where the train is stopped, make a stroll next to the train and down the opposite embankment as we started from.  We did disable all GameWorks features for this test but had Tesselation enabled.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019)

Call of Duty Modern Warfare is back and this time on a new engine running DX12 to allow for some sick DXR Ray Traced Shadows, but we're not testing that here since this card isn't designed for that level of rendering. We tested in the 'Fog of War' mission where we tested our RT performance run. At 1080p we set the settings all to High.

Resident Evil 2

The Resident Evil 2 Remake more than delivered on the promises it made as a game.  While it does have DX12 support the DX11 implementation is far superior and because of that, we will be sticking to DX11 for this title.  We take our performance measurements from when Leo and Claire are first separated and as Leon, we have to make our way through the burning street, down an alleyway, and across to the Police Station gates.

Borderlands 3

Borderlands 3 has made its way into the test lineup thanks to strong demand by gamers and simply delivering MORE Borderlands. This game is rather intensive after the Medium preset and since this is a budget focused 1080p card Medium it is. We tested using the built-in benchmark utility

Time to crank it to 11, or something like that. I was a bit hesitant to spend much time with overclocking the ZOTAC Gaming GTX 1650 Twin Fan primarily due to its cooler design but after a few minutes of playing about with MSI Afterburner is was clear that concern wasn't very founded. I went for what I would call a comfortable overclock rather than trying to go balls out and find the absolute limit of the GPU. As always mileage varies from card to card but we found ours easily taking an extra 150MHz to the base clock resulting in an in game frequency of 2030-2050MHz. The memory was a real champ here allowing for an addition +999MHz to slider resulting in operating speeds of 14Gbps and a bandwidth boost to 224GB/s over the factory default 196BG/s. Thermals didn't budge and power only ticked up 5 watts in total, long and short of whether you should overclock this card or not? Do it and keep on trucking.

Firestrike

Firestrike is running the DX11 API and is still a good measure of GPU scaling performance, in this test we ran the regular version of Firestrike which runs at 1080p and we recorded the Graphics Score only as the Physics and combined are not pertinent to this review.

Time Spy

Time Spy is running the DX12 API and we used it in the same manner as Firestrike Extreme where we only recorded the Graphics Score as the Physics score is recording the CPU performance and isn't important to the testing we are doing here.

Forza Horizon 4

Forza Horizon 4 carries on the open-world racing tradition of the Horizon series.  The latest DX12 powered entry is beautifully crafted and amazingly well executed and is a great showcase of DX12 games.  We use the benchmark run while having all of the settings set to non-dynamic with an uncapped framerate to gather these results.

Rainbow 6 Siege

Rainbow 6 Siege has maintained a massive following since its launch and it consistently in Steams Top Ten highest player count game.  In a title where the higher the framerate the better in a tactical yet fast-paced competitive landscape is essential, we include this title despite its ludicrously high framerates.  We use the Ultra preset with the High Defenition Texture Pack as well and gather our results from the built-in benchmarking tool.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint

Ghost Recon Breakpoint sees a return of the DX11 powered Anvil Next Engine and does a wonderful job beating the daylights out of modern hardware.  Because of this, we run the game at the High preset.  We take our measurements from the built-in benchmarking tool.

Thermals

Thermals were measured from our open test bench after running the Time Spy graphics test 2 on loop for 30 minutes recording the highest temperatures reported. The room was climate controlled and kept at a constant 22c throughout the testing.

Power Draw

Power draw numbers were taken from the total system power draw by measuring with a Kill-A-Watt. We ran Unigine Valley for 30 minutes and observed the highest sustained load. Something to keep in mind when observing total system power draw is that there are times where a GPU simply being faster and requiring more from the CPU can cause the total system power draw to increase with the like of the Core i9-9900K. That said, the total system power draw is still important as it is how much power it is taking to run the system.

At only a $10 premium over the vanilla GeForce GTX 1650, a few more bucks than the Radeon RX 570 and about the same as the RX 580, the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER offers excellent performance for the pricing. Unless you simply need a card without a power adapter there isn't any reason to save the money and go lower, but with the features that come with GeForce Experience and other extras NVIDIA has been working into their cards lately there isn't much reason to sidegrade to one of the Radeon cards unless you absolutely need an 8GB frame buffer and can find one at a massive discount or just want a much bigger and more power hungry card. The ZOTAC Gaming GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER might be tiny, and it does have a bit of an anemic cooler, but it does all come together with a very solid delivery and overclocks decently well to deliver extra performance without adding to the cost. At $159.99 the GeForce GTX 1650 is the card to beat at under $200. The ZOTAC Gaming GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER walks away with an easy win of the Great Value Award and is absolutely worthy of the SUPER moniker.

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