ZOTAC GAMING GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER Twin Fan Review

Overclocking, Should You?

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.

You can find additional information about our hardware review process and ethics policy here.

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.

Pros

• Great Pricing
• Great Performance Improvement over GTX 1650 (Non-SUPER)
• Turing NVENC onboard vs Volta NVENC on GTX 1650 (Non-SUPER)
• Great upgrade from GTX 1050 / GTX 950
• Features 12 Gbps GDDR6 Memory chips for extra bandwidth
• Great gaming performance at 1080p resolution
• Great performance for eSports Gaming Titles
• Power efficiency has increased drastically
• Support NVIDIA Adaptive Shading Technology
• Good driver support for GeForce products, compatibility with DX11, DX12, Vulkan, OpenGL titles
• Good Display Connectivity, support for VESA Adaptive-Sync and G-Sync Compatible Monitors

Cons

• No backplate included
• No RTX / DLSS Support

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