The Great Expectations:
nVidia’s recent run has been amazing! The four RTX 20xx cards, followed by the GTX 1660 Ti and 1660 non-Ti, have all been winners. These cards have had great power consumption, great temperatures, and low noise levels. More importantly, nVidia gave you the ultimate reason to buy them: They beat the competition in terms of power. If new cards came out and performed worse than old cards… who would buy them? Right?
The Unfortunate Reality:
Which brings us to the launch of the GTX 1650. Someone over at nVidia, possibly intoxicated by the fantastic success of previous launches, decided that this new GTX 1650 should be priced at $150. That makes it a direct competitor to the $130 RX 570 from AMD. You would expect that the newer, more expensive card would beat the older, cheaper card, right? As you might have guessed by now, nVidia completely bungled this launch, with the GTX 1650 performing an average of 10% worse than the RX 570, while costing $20 more.
(Pop-Culture-References-Я-Us. Wait till next week where we spoil the Avengers movie ending for internet points!)
Now, hardcore nVidia fans (because we are too polite to say fanboys) may argue that this card is suitable for someone who wants something that works without a GPU power connector, and is willing to sacrifice gaming performance for it. With good iGPUs available from both AMD and Intel, that means that the only reasonable scenario for a GTX 1650 purchase is if there is someone who needs to upgrade the graphics card, but is unable to upgrade the PSU, and that PSU provides no PCIe power. That target market is so slim, it would make Ariana Grande feel jealous.
So that is that. Until the GTX 1650 is more reasonably priced when compared to the competition (i.e $120 max), we cannot recommend it.
Other Updates:
- The R5 1500X has been retired in favour of the R5 1600, due to pricing.
- The R7 2700 is now an alternative option in the Very Good tier.
- RAM descriptions have been changed, with the DDR3 warning removed.
Going Forward:
Almost all reviews mentioned that we should be getting a GTX 1650 Ti sometime in the future. Hopefully, that card will be more competitive. AMD is expected to release its new cards in June or July, so there is that to look forward to. Well… about as much as we can “look forward” to an AMD GPU launch these days. Let me rephrase that to be more honest: AMD is expected to release its new cards in June or July, and we hope that for the first time in ~3 years, AMD’s non-CPU offerings will fail to disappoint us.