ASUS ROG Strix GTX 1650 SUPER OC Review (O4G)

1. Introduction2. ASUS ROG Strix GTX 1650 SUPER3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy (1080p, 1440p, 4K)5. Battlefield V (1080p, 1440p, 4K)6. The Division 2 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)7. F1 2019 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)8. Far Cry New Dawn (1080p, 1440p, 4K)9. Gears 5 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)10. Ghost Recon: Wildlands (1080p, 1440p, 4K)11. Metro Exodus (1080p, 1440p, 4K)12. Middle Earth: Shadow of War (1080p, 1440p, 4K)13. Shadow of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 1440p, 4K)14. Total War: Three Kingdoms (1080p, 1440p, 4K)15. Clock Speed16. Temperatures17. Acoustics18. Power Consumption19. Overclocking: Frequency and Games20. Overclocking: Temperatures, Acoustics, Power21. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

It has been a busy twelve months for Nvidia, with new graphics cards being announced left, right and centre. The latest of these is GTX 1650 SUPER, and today we are reviewing ASUS ROG's Strix OC edition card. We initially unboxed this card for launch, but we can now present our full review and see how 1650 SUPER lines up against the likes of the RX 580 and GTX 1660.

In typical ASUS ROG fashion, the Strix GTX 1650 SUPER OC (O4G) is a high-end card with few – if any – compromises. For a xx50 series model it certainly packs in a whole range of features, including on-board dual-BIOS, an on-board fan header, 2.4-slot cooler, a metal backplate and RGB lighting. All of these do drive up the price, and the Strix is one of the most expensive 1650 SUPER cards going, priced at £199.99.

Considering other cards start at £149.99, including dual-fan models like ASUS' own TUF Gaming SKU, the Strix has a 33% price premium over those cards. Can it justify the expense?

GPU	GTX 1660 Ti	GTX 1660 SUPER	GTX 1660	GTX 1650 SUPER	GTX 1650
SMs	24	22	22	20	14
CUDA Cores	1536	1408	1408	1280	896
Texture Units	96	88	88	80	56
ROPs	48	48	48	32	32
GPU Boost Clock	1770 MHz	1785 MHz	1785 MHz	1725 MHz	1665 MHz
Memory Data Rate	12 Gbps	14 Gbps	8 Gbps	12 Gbps	8 Gbps
Total Video Memory	6GB GDDR6	6GB GDDR6	6GB GDDR5	4GB GDDR6	4GB GDDR5
Memory Interface	192-bit	192-bit	192-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Memory Bandwidth	288.1 GB/sec	336 GB/sec	192.1 GB/sec	192 GB/sec	128 GB/sec
TGP	120W	125W	120W	100W	75W

If you missed the initial 1650 SUPER announcement, it’s worth re-capping the core spec of the GPU, as unlike the GTX 1660 SUPER this isn’t just a refresh with upgraded memory modules. In fact, the 1650 SUPER uses a physically different GPU – where the original GTX 1650 uses the TU117 GPU, 1650 SUPER actually uses the TU116 GPU, which is also used for the GTX 1660/1660 SUPER/1660 Ti.

That means this new card sports a total of 20 streaming multiprocessors, each with 64 CUDA cores – for a total of 1280. This is only two SMs, or 128 CUDA cores, less than the GTX 1660/1660 SUPER, but it is 384 cores more than the vanilla GTX 1650 – so in that regard you can think of the 1650 SUPER as a ‘cut-down 1660’, rather than a ‘beefed-up 1650’.

That said, the 1650 SUPER does have fewer ROPs (32) and texture units (80) compared to the 1660, so it's not exactly like-for-like. On top of that, while there is still 4GB of VRAM, this comes in the form of 12Gbps GDDR6 memory, instead of the 8Gbps GDDR5 memory of the original GTX 1650. However, the memory bus is still 128-bit, instead of 192-bit as per the 1660.

Clock speed for reference 1650 SUPER is rated at 1725MHz, but as this is a Strix OC edition, the card runs at 1785MHz out of the box. ASUS does mention the card runs at 185MHz in ‘OC Mode' but this requires users to download the GPU Tweak software and isn't indicative of the out of the box speeds.

Lastly, due to the change in physical GPU, 1650 SUPER has an increased total graphics power (TGP) rating of 100W. This means all cards will have a 6-pin power connector, so unlike some vanilla 1650 models, the cards' cannot draw all their power through the PCIe slot.

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