Sparkle GeForce GTX 650 Ti Dragon Series review

1. Introduction2. Sparkle Geforce GTX650Ti Dragon Series3. Testing Methodology & Overclocking4. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark5. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage6. Synthetic: 3DMark 117. Gaming: 3DMark8. Gaming: Alien V Predator (DX11)9. Gaming: Total War Shogun 2 (DX11)10. Gaming: Far Cry 2 (DX10)11. Gaming: Far Cry 3 (DX11)12. Gaming: Dirt Showdown (DX11)13. Gaming: Sleeping Dogs (DX11)14. Gaming: Max Payne 3 (DX11)15. Technical: Thermal Dynamics16. Technical: Acoustics Performance17. Technical: Power Consumption18. Technical: Overclocking19. Closing Thoughts20. View All Pages

The Sparkle GeForce GTX 650 Ti Dragon Series is a very capable graphics card at a very tempting price point. It goes to prove that you really don't need to spend £800 on a video card just to play games with high image quality settings on a 1080p panel.

We highlighted today that the Sparkle GTX650 Ti Dragon Series was able to power demanding Direct X 11 titles such as Alien V Predator at very high resolution settings. Other demanding Direct X 11 titles like Dirt Showdown were (borderline) playable at 1080p with the ULTRA preset and 8 x anti aliasing.

Obviously when we crank the image quality settings in the latest Direct X 11 titles such as Sleeping Dogs and Max Payne 3 the card shows bandwidth limitations. At this price we do expect to make some compromises and a little reduction in image quality settings push the frame rate back into the sweet zone.

The Sparkle GTX650 Ti Dragon Series graphics card is quiet, even when heavily loaded, and demands very little power at the socket, around 65 watts when gaming. Thanks to the adoption of a capable dual fan cooling system the card never runs hot either, hovering between the 55c and 60c zone under load, and dropping to under 30c when idle.

If you currently game on a 1080p panel and are limited in budget to less than £150, then the GTX 650 Ti deserves some serious consideration. The only issue right now is availability in the United Kingdom. Sparkle informed us before going live that stock has yet to reach our shores, but you can buy it from Mindfactory.de in Germany for around 130 euro. We would expect it to sell for around the £115-£120 mark in the UK when it arrives.

Pros:

• Competitive pricing.
• great gaming performance at 1080p.
• quiet.
• runs cool.
• low power demand at socket.

Cons:

• extensive competition between £120-£150.
• poor availability.

Kitguru says: A quiet, competitively priced gaming card, ideal for budget oriented gamers at 1080p resolutions.

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