The Reference Card – Short and Stubby

For our review today NVIDIA sent along a reference card of the GeForce GTX 650 Ti and we quickly took note of its short size and stature at the PC Perspective offices, dubbing it "Stubby."  With a small form factor and modest cooler, the GTX 650 Ti definitely packs more performance than its looks give it credit for.

The card PCB extends only to the length of the x16 PCI Express slot and my thought is that NVIDIA could have made it smaller if they wanted to release a x8 graphics card.  The reference cooler doesn't surround the PCB this time either exposing the board and you get the feeling that we are indeed looking at a less expensive product.

For outputs the reference model will ship with a pair of DL DVI connections and a mini-HDMI port.  NVIDIA did explain that the GPU supports four display outputs like the rest of the Kepler line up but they are leaving it to board partners to release models that do that.

Even though it is short, with a TDP of 110 watts, the GTX 650 Ti does require a single 6-pin PCIe power connection.  You can also see in this angle that though the back plane is only a single slot, even the reference cooler will require two slots of internal space.

Just another angle showing some of the component layout.

The 1GB of memory is completely housed under the cooler on the front of the card leaving the back pretty blank.

A preview of our performance testing on the following pages, here you see the reference GTX 650 Ti surrounded by an XFX Radeon HD 7850 1GB (left) and an AMD Radeon HD 7770 1GB (right).  The difference in size and cooler selection is substantial.

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