Introduction
It hasn’t been a long time since the launch of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 660, a graphics card which managed to impress us, packing some respectable horsepower into a small frame, and carrying a rather nice price tag. To date, nothing in Nvidia’s Kepler stable matched up against AMD’s more budget-range Radeon 7850 and 7770 cards though, but that’s about to change with today’s launch of the GeForce GTX 650 Ti.
The Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti is the latest in the Kepler lineup, and while it may share a similar naming scheme as the GTX 660 Ti, it has some very distinct differences, not the least of which is a considerably lower price tag. Costing about $149 for the reference design (and about $10 to $20 more for most partner cards), this creates a very interesting scenario, as it sits just above the Radeon 7770 in terms of price, so the question is whether this new Kepler card has the horsepower to compete in areas other than simply price.

Today’s review here is a look at the reference Nvidia GTX 650 Ti design, and we’ll also be looking at several other partner cards in separate reviews, so be sure to check those out for overclocked versions and custom cooler designs.
Nvidia has been extremely successful with the Kepler products, so will this card measure up? Can it beat the competing Radeon cards? Let’s dive in and answer those questions and more.