Gigabyte GTX 1650 OC 4G Review

Conclusion

Whenever it comes to this end of the marketplace the amount of choice is almost bewildering. More than almost any other item of hardware you’ll ever buy, the amount you spend on a graphics card has a very real impact upon the amount of FPS you can expect to achieve.

Knowing that most of us might dream of the RTX 2080Ti or similar cards, but have wallets more designed for low end gaming, manufacturers have umpteen card types available to tempt you, and each of those has countless variations from the various partner manufacturers. There was a time not that long ago when there were actually too many cards available and the pricing gap between each was so tiny that many cards didn’t sell at all as there just wasn’t a market for them. We thought those days were gone but the recent Nvidia business model has brought that back in full force.

The RTX 2080Ti is obviously king, then the regular 2080 is for those on a tighter, but still large, budget. The RTX 2070 fits those who want RTX goodness at 1440, the RTX 2060 is very much the pick of the bunch being affordable but extremely good. Like, seriously outstanding value for money. With the launch of the GTX 1660Ti, shorn of the RTX features that differentiated the new Turing GPUs from their Pascal brethren, we could just about see the point of a card that was fairly affordable but still gave good performance. The GTX 1660 was a harder sell, not being cheap enough compared to the competition to be an easy buy for the budgeteers, nor powerful enough to convince people to step away from the AMD packages that come with many free games. Now Nvidia have yet further saturated the market with the GTX 1650, which is nowhere near cheap enough to appear on anyones radar. Yes your finances might be limited, but very little extra money can bring you more performance from a card higher up in the range, or free games from the alternate brand. If you brought the GTX 1650 you’d be very disappointed as it struggles to beat the GTX 1050Ti, a card that proved wildly popular. Who’d want to spend what limited funds they have on a card which doesn’t really make a difference? You want to have you jaw, relatively, dropped. Nvidia need to take a look in the mirror and decide if having a fleet of barely different cards at price points so close that an extra tenner will get you the next one up is a good business model.

Now, we have to emphasise that this is all Nvidia based criticism. The vendors themselves have no control over the MSRP and thus the price of the Gigabyte GTX 1650 OC 4G is solely because of the price Nvidia have set as the baseline. Given that Gigabyte have equipped the GTX 1650 OC 4G with a twin fan cooler and kept the price extremely close to MSRP they need to be commended. Although the GTX 1650 isn’t a warm card the addition of extra cooling does let the overclock work well and, as you saw from our graphs, this is a GPU that absolutely needs to be overclocked to extract the most out of it. At stock it’s fairly insipid but with an overclock in place and some judicious setting choices it’s far more like the type of performance you’d expect from a card aimed at the mid-range 1080P gamer.

The fly in the ointment of the GTX 1650 is the AMD range and the wide choice of games you get free with the card. Remember if you buy a new GPU the first thing you want to do is see what new eye candy it has brought you, and when money is tight none of us have AAA titles in our libraries unplayed until we can afford a new GPU. Nvidia need to either slash the MSRP of the base cards or start giving us free games, especially for those on limited finances.

The Gigabyte GTX 1650 is realistically the best that this new Nvidia Turing GPU can be. It’s still very close to the baseline price but with a factory overclock and beefed up cooling it performs relatively well. We’d still recommend saving an extra month and grabbing a higher model but if you must have a GTX card and you must have it today, then the Gigabyte GTX 1650 OC 4G is a good choice.

  

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