GTX 650 Ti Boost SLI reviewed

As we demonstrated in our previous GTX 650 Ti Boost reviews, from Gainward’s and EVGA’s stables, Nvidia’s new card seems to tick all the right boxes and hit the sweet spot. It can cope with 1080p gaming at high detail settings, it can deliver reasonable frame rates and it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Performance is adequate for most titles at 1080p, and even when the GTX 650 Ti Boost runs out of steam, it is relatively easy to tinker with detail levels and get playable frame rates. It is quite simply a very good choice for gamers on a budget, who don’t want to sacrifice a lot of visual quality, but don’t want to break the bank and get a high-end card.

However, the GTX 650 Ti Boost is the cheapest SLI capable card on the market. It doesn’t sound like much of a selling point in this market segment, but on the other hand the Boost is a relatively capable card, so the decision to include SLI support sounds interesting. True, it might be better to invest €300 in a high-end Radeon or Geforce rather than go for an SLI setup with two GTX 650 Ti Boost cards, but then again SLI could come in handy when it’s time to upgrade.

Before we take a look at the SLI results, let’s take a look at the GTX 650 Ti Boost itself. Based on the same GK106 silicon used in the plain GTX 650 Ti and GTX 660, the GTX 650 Ti Boost seems to combine the best of both worlds. It has 768 CUDA cores, somewhat less than the GTX 660, which has 960 cores. One SMX module on the GTX 650 Ti and GTX 650 Ti Boost is disabled, so they end up with fewer cores.

The GTX 650 Ti Boost features 64 texture units, while the GTX 660 has 80. However, the Boost card shares some features with the GTX 660 as well, namely Nvidia’s GPU Boost technology, the 192-bit memory bus, 2GB of GDDR5 memory and 24 ROPs.

As the name suggests, GPU Boost allows the card to boost GPU clocks depending on load and thermals. Thanks to the new bus and faster memory chips, the new card has 66 percent more bandwidth compared to the plain GTX 650 Ti, which uses a 128-bit memory bus. This is clearly a huge difference.