"NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost adds a strong sub-$200 option to the company's lineup. Thanks to the added GPU Boost clock algorithm and a beefed up 192-bit memory interface, we see massive performance gains compared to the GTX 650 Ti without Boost. MSI's GTX 650 Ti Boost uses the company's famous TwinFrozr cooler and comes with a 50 MHz GPU overclock out of the box, which is about average when considering what's available on the market. Unfortunately memory is not overclocked, which would have been easy, given how much headroom we saw in our manual testing. In real-life performance, this overclock translates into just a 3% improvement, which is lower than what we've seen on other factory-overclocked cards. EVGA's card, for example, boosts up to 1250 MHz, while this card only goes up to 1175 MHz. MSI apparently used more conservative Boost settings in their BIOS. Compared to other cards, we found a large 28% improvement over the original GTX 650 Ti, which definitely makes the difference between "slow" and "very playable" at 1080p. Compared to AMD's lineup, we see performance that is 10% higher than the HD 7850 and 29% higher than the recently released HD 7790.
MSI's TwinFrozr cooler is well-known for being a good thermal solution and the company was wise to use it on this card, too. It offers fantastic cooling performance and equally low noise levels. The card is essentially inaudible in both idle and load when installed in any actively cooled system. Even with those incredible noise levels, it manages to do so without running into high temperatures. We've recently tested a triple slot GTX 650 Ti Boost from Inno3D; the card tested today provides similar noise and temperature levels with just a dual-slot cooler. This is testament to how well the MSI heatsink works."
