MSI GTX 1650 Ventus XS OC review
Updated: Jun 17, 2021
Many gamers aim for the "budget" line-up for hardware. But the budget segment is an overly sensitive one. One can easily get bad hardware for a lucrative price. Although not completely unseen, the probability of getting bad hardware in the higher end is rare. But, when you get exactly the hardware you need for your use, you would not want to miss it too in the budget segment. That is the case with the MSI GeForce GTX 1650 Ventus XS OC. TL; DR: it's worth every penny.
The budget segment is an overly sensitive one. One can easily get bad hardware for a lucrative price.
UNBOXING:
The MSI GTX 1650 Ventus XS OC has modest packaging.
Inside the box, we get write-ups and manuals, and the graphics card lies inside a plastic non-static bag.
Overall, the unboxing experience is solid. It does not have any surprises and is just what you would want.
DESIGN:
The Ventus XS OC is a compact card. And that makes sense. 1650 is a budget card. It replaces the old 1050Ti. Gamers at this budget go for M-ATX cases. And compact cards are what they would want.
Overall, the design is sporty. The card has two 90mm fans. The beefy heatsink hints at this card's overclocking capability.
The 1650 Ventus XS doesn't have a backplate, and that is a bit underwhelming. The PCB design is good, so it doesn't look awkward, but a backplate could have made things even better.
This card has one HDMI port, one Display Port and one DVI port. But we would have loved two Display Ports in place of that DVI.
For the bottom line, we loved the design of the MSI GTX 1650 Ventus XS OC. It's sporty and has a good colour combo to fit all builds simultaneously.
INITIAL THOUGHTS:
The GTX 1650 is based on the award-winning Turing architecture and has the TU117 chip. It packs 4GB of 12 GBps GDDR6 VRAM and is good for up to 192 GBps of memory bandwidth. With the system requirements of all 3D programs and video games rising, 4GB VRAM is a little bit on the lower side in 2021. The amount of VRAM will bottleneck the card.
The GTX 1650 has 896 CUDA cores, and no Tensor or RT cores. It has a base clock of 1410 MHz and a boost clock of up to 1620 MHz. It outperforms the ageing GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and its equivalent Radeon RX 560 by almost 70% to even 100% in a few tests.
BENCH SETUP
Processor: Intel Core i5 9400F 6C/6T @2.90 GHz Motherboard: Gigabyte H310M H2.0 rev2.0 Cooler: Thermaltake UX200 ARGB 153.5mm RAM: Adata XPG Spectrix D40 8GB @2400MHz x2 Case: Ant Esports ICE 300TG Graphics Card: MSI GeForce GTX 1650 Ventus XS OC 4GB GDDR6 PSU: CoolerMaster MWE 550W 80+ White OS: Windows 10 Pro 20H2 Ambient temperature: 34℃
PERFORMANCE:
We tested the GTX 1650 in lots of AAA titles and esports titles alike. The results are pretty interesting.
Starting with popular AAA titles, this card performs more than expected. We weren't expecting a budget GPU to perform this good. While the card can still benefit from more VRAM estate, the temperatures are impressive. Even in a terrible case like the Ant Esports ICE 300TG, which has little to almost no good airflow, this card maintains a temperature of around 31°C to 36°C over ambient.
BENCHMARKS:
We ran lots of benchmarks, and the scores are decent for a budget system. We are just as close to a high-end gaming laptop from 2017. And considering that games haven't gotten that much intensive since 2017, we get all that performance.
3DMARK TimeSpy:
We scored 3831 points in the 3DMark TimeSpy benchmark. Although that score is substandard according to 3DMark, we know how it performs. Check out the detailed benchmark results here: https://www.3dmark.com/spy/20773473
3DMARK FireStrike:
In the DirectX 11 benchmark from 3DMark, FireStrike, we scored 9132 points. Check out the detailed benchmark results here: https://www.3dmark.com/fs/25704190
Unigine Superposition:
In 1080p Extreme settings, we scored 1916 points on this setup.
Other Benchmarks We Tried:
Other than the above benchmarks, we also ran the Unigine Valley, Furmark and PCMark 10 benchmarks.
Staring with Unigine Valley, this setup scored 2142 points in 1080p Extreme HD settings. In the Furmark benchmark, it scored 3725 points with 62 FPS on average. In PCMark 10, we scored 5121 points.
OVERCLOCKING:
We applied a core offset of +100 MHz and a memory offset of +300 MHz.
The 3D Mark TimeSpy scores jump up to 4047 from 3831, and that is a substantial 5.6% increase.
Moving on to FireStrike, we score 9356, up from 9132. That is a 2.45% increase. Pretty decent.
In Cyberpunk, we get an average of 33 frames, with 23 and 20 frames as 1% and 0.1% lows. That is up from 28, 17 and 9 frames that we got before OC. Pretty solid performance gain.
In the SuperPosition benchmark, we get 2008 points. That is a massive increase from the 1916 points we scored without overclocking this thing.
We ran the Furmark GPU stress test on this thing for 35 minutes straight, and the temperatures hovered around 32℃ to 33℃ over ambient without any performance hiccups in terms of frame time spikes or stutters.
CONCLUSION:
1650 is 1650. It replaces the ageing 1050 Ti, and it does that job very well. We don’t have any special complaints about its performance. Well, at this price point, we can’t ask for more. It can play all the recent games at high to even ultra-settings in a few titles. And although the benchmark scores are underwhelming, if it does the job, who will complain? The benchmarks are against the most enthusiast hardware out there, maybe 3090s and 5900Xs. But this setup costs a quarter of what 3090s and 5900Xs cost. And if at this price point it can deliver the performance, then there is no reason to ditch them.
Well, I strongly recommend the MSI Ventus XS OC version of 1650 because it has been built for OC, which you would want in an already low performing GPU. The Gaming X is kind of an overkill, but if you want to OC further, the Gaming X is the way to go.
Watch the video review from Cyber Tech Tok here:
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