ASUS GTX 650 Ti Boost DCII

Shawn Michaels May 8, 2013 Hardware, NVIDIA, Reviews & Articles, Video Cards/Graphics Cards 1 Comment

Testing & Methodology

We’ve expanded our testing suite considerably since the X79 chipset release, and will continue to use the same methods for most of the motherboards and CPU’s we test. In the interests of thoroughness and accurate results, we run each test at least three times, and some tests more than that. We average the total of all the tests from each benchmark then report the average here.

The OS we use is Windows 7 Pro 64bit with all patches and updates applied. We also use the latest drivers available for the motherboard and any devices attached to the computer. We do not disable background tasks or tweak the OS or system in any way. We turn off drive indexing and daily defragging. We also turn off Prefetch and Superfetch. This is not an attempt to produce bigger benchmark numbers. Drive indexing and defragging can interfere with testing and produce confusing numbers. If a test were to be run while a drive was being indexed or defragged, and then the same test was later run when these processes were off, the two results would be contradictory and erroneous. As we cannot control when defragging and indexing occur precisely enough to guarantee that they won’t interfere with testing, we opt to disable the features entirely.

Prefetch tries to predict what users will load the next time they boot the machine by caching the relevant files and storing them for later use. We want to learn how the program runs without any of the files being cached, and we disable it so that each test run we do not have to clear Prefetch to get accurate numbers. Lastly we disable Superfetch. Superfetch loads often-used programs into the memory. It is one of the reasons that Windows occupies so much memory. Vista fills the memory in an attempt to predict what users will load. Having one test run with files cached, and another test run with the files un-cached would result in inaccurate numbers. Again, since we can’t control its timings so precisely, it we turn it off. Because these four features can potentially interfere with benchmarking, and and are out of our control, we disable them. We do not disable anything else.

We are revamping our testing method in order to better represent motherboard performance and offering to the consumer. Also we want to make it an easier read for you without miles of endless charts. We ask that you provide feedback in an effort to help us deliver better reviews for you.

Test Rig

Test Rig
Case	Thermaltake Level 10 GT
CPU	Intel Core i7-3770K
Motherboard	ASUS Maximus V Gene
Ram	16GbpsB Patriot Viper Xtreme 2400MHz +
CPU Cooler	Swiftech H20-220 Edge
Hard Drive	Western Digital Velociraptor 300GB
SSD	Intel 510 series SATA III 120GB
Optical	ASUS BD-ROM
GPU	ASUS GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost DirectCU II
Additional Cards	N/A
PSU	Thermaltake Toughpower XT 1275W Platinum
Mouse	Tt eSPORTS Black gaming mouse
Keyboard	Tt eSPORTS Meka G1 mechanical gaming keyboard

 

Test Suite

We will use the following applications to test the performance of the graphics card.

Synthetic Benchmarks & Games

Benchmarks
3DMark11
Heaven Benchmark 3.0
Batman: Arkham City
Just Cause 2
Lost Planet 2
Dirt 3
Metro 2033

 

Overclocking

The ASUS GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost card employs a excellent mix of SAP components as always which means excellent power delivery and stability for some fun overclocking runs.

We were able to get the core to a max clock of 1112MHz which is not bad at all. With a bit more voltage, you can easily go higher, as there is great thermal headroom available.

The memory was similar as default is already past 6GHz frequency but the card easily clocked past 6900MHz to a final stable frequency of 6960MHz which is a sizable 16% overclock.

These overclocks are completely stable across game testing and benchmarks and while the card may pull a little further for short benchmark runs this is the max we could get to be considered fully stable. This could easily enable a few extra frames and give a much smoother gameplay for a gamer who might have been on the edge previously. This and the fact that I’ve never been one to complain about free performance so we’re not gonna start now.

 

Clock	Stock Frequency	Max stable MHz	OC Percent
GPU Base clock	1020MHz	1112MHz	9%
Memory clock	1502MHz (6008MHz)	1740MHz (6960MHz)	16%

In order to ensure no system bottleneck we clocked the CPU to 4.6GHz to ensure there is no reason the system will slow down the cards performance at all.

Some may ask why we chose the mainstream Z77 system, and we can explain. Up until recent the X79 enthusiasts platform did not really support PCI-E Gen 3 on the Nvidia 600 series GPU’s. Because of the inherent instability many have seen with the X79 platform with Gen 3 products, Nvidia has been hesitant to enable it, and now there is a workaround via registry to get it working. However, in order to ensure the most consistent testing possible, we have stuck to the natively supported Z77 platform.

 

Important note: Overclocking can cause component failure. Please exercise caution when attempting any level of overclock on system components.

 

Temperatures

The temperatures were recorded with full loaded Heaven benchmark looping for over 30 minutes or longer depending how long it took for the card to level out in temps and sat at a plateau for more than 10 minutes.

GPU Temperatures	Temperature (Idle/Load)
ASUS GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost DirectCU II OC	30C/62C
ASUS GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost DirectCU II	30C/57C

The DirectCU II cooler worked excellently as the fans stayed nice and quiet throughout the runs and even when overclocked it swallowed up the heat and kept chugging along without issue.

 

Real world/Gaming Benchmarks

3DMARK 11

3DMark 11 is the newest in Futuremark’s suite of benchmarking utilities. Its a fully capable DirectX11 benchmark which also stresses and analyzes the system performance as a whole to simulate a heavy rendering environment such as a high end game or other app the end user may run. This benchmark was run with Performance settings 5 times and all runs were averaged for the result below.

3DMark 11 shows where the ASUS card falls in line with the standard NV Reference model. As you can see it jumps ahead a bit due to the higher clock, on both the extreme and performance presets

 

Unigine Heaven 3.0

Unigine Heaven is a benchmark program based on Unigine Corp’s latest engine, Unigine. The engine features DirectX 11, Hardware tessellation, DirectCompute, and Shader Model 5.0. All of these new technologies combined with the ability to run each card through the same exact test means this benchmark should be in our arsenal for a long time.

 

Here we see the ASUS model gains a full FPS on heaven which may into seem like much but heaven is a very stressful app.

 

Metro 2033

 

Metro 2033 has always been extraordinarily stressful for GPU’s, and this has not changed with time. Here you can see the ASUS 650 Ti Boost offers an average of over 30 FPS which means for the most part it should be relatively playable at full settings at HD resolutions although we think most would tweak the eye candy down just a bit in order to get more consistent minimum FPS which means less stuttering or jumpiness.

 

Lost Planet 2

 

Lost Planet 2 shows also very nice framerates and even the dips were not bad as the card pulled at max settings very respectable performance. It makes me wonder how well two of them would do when paired up.

 

Batman: Arkham City

 

We tested Batman Arkham City and the 650 ti Boost bested the previous generation flagship GTX 580 which is saying something since this card is about 25% the cost of a 580 at launch.

Just Cause 2

 

We just had to test Just cause 2 as it is an awesome game with some very good visuals. The 650 Ti Boost here pulls very playable framerates averaging over 60 which means we are talking optimal gameplay with likely no stuttering or jumpiness at all.

 

Dirt 3

 

Dirt 3 is a great game for visuals and yet pulls very reasonable framerates on most cards so the 650 Ti Boost pulls over 60 easily. With that its at the heels of the 7870 and even the upper level GTX 660 model which is very good for a card of this level.