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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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