NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Round-Up: EVGA, ZOTAC, GB


Test System and Unigine Heaven v3

How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards in this article on an Asus P9X79 Deluxe motherboard powered by a Core i7-3960X six-core processor and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR3-1866 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system UEFI and set all values to their "optimized" or "high performance" default settings and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The memory's X.M.P. profile was enabled to ensure better-than-stock performance and the hard drive was then formatted and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the installation was complete we fully updated the OS and installed the latest DirectX redist, along with the drivers, games, and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

HotHardware's Test System
Intel Core i7 Powered

Hardware Used:
Intel Core i7-3960X
(3.3GHz, Six-Core)
Asus P9X79 Deluxe
(Intel X79 Express)

Radeon HD 7770
Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition
Radeon HD 7850 1GB OC
Radeon HD 7850
GeForce GTX 660 Ti
GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Core 
MSI GTX 660 Power Edition
Zotac GeForce GTX 650 Ti AMP!
Gigabyte GTX 650 Ti Windforce OC
EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti SSC

16GB GSKILL DDR3-1866
Western Digital Raptor 150GB
Integrated Audio
Integrated Network

Relevant Software:
Windows 7 Ultimate x64
DirectX April 2011 Redist
ATI Catalyst v12.8/v12.9B
NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v306.23 / v306.38

Benchmarks Used:

Unigine Heaven v3
3DMark 11
Batman: Arkham City
Just Cause 2
Alien vs. Predator
Metro 2033
Lost Planet 2
Dirt: Showdown

Unigine Heaven v3.0 Benchmark
Pseudo-DirectX 11 Gaming


Unigine Heaven v3.0

Unigine's Heaven Benchmark v3.0 is built around the Unigine game engine. Unigine is a cross-platform, real-time 3D engine, with support for DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and OpenGL. The Heaven benchmark--when run in DX11 mode--also makes comprehensive use of tessellation technology and advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) It also features volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm and a dynamic sky with light scattering.

The new GeForce GTX 650 Ti cards all finished within a few percentage points of one another, regardless of their frequencies or memory configurations (1GB or 2GB). Generally speaking, the 650 Ti cards finish well ahead of the Radeon HD 7770 here, but a notch behind the 1GB Radeon HD 7850. The higher-end GeForce GTX 600 series cards are all significantly faster, as you would expect.


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