Best Graphics Cards For The Money: October

Since our last monthly update, Nvidia launched three new graphics cards: the GeForce GTX 650, 650 Ti, and 660.

The GeForce GTX 650 is essentially a GeForce GT 640 with a higher-clocked 1058 MHz core and 1250 MHz GDDR5 (instead of 891 MHz DDR3 memory). That increased memory bandwidth immediately uncorks this card's performance, putting it head-to-head against the Radeon HD 7750. A $120 price point sounds about right until you hop online and see AMD's Radeon HD 7750 selling for $105. The notably faster Radeon HD 7770 goes for $125. After a series of price drops from AMD, the GeForce GTX 650 needs to get closer to $105 before it's really competitive.

Next, the GeForce GTX 650 Ti is built around the same GK106 GPU found on Nvidia's GeForce GTX 660, but with a single GPC cluster disabled. The result is a processor with 768 shaders, 64 texture units, and two ROP partitions capable of 16 raster operations per clock. The card's core operates at 925 MHz, and its GDDR5 memory runs at 1350 MHz. All told, the GeForce GTX 650 Ti outperforms AMD's Radeon HD 6850 and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 460, nearly reaching the same performance levels as the GeForce GTX 560 and Radeon HD 6870. Unfortunately, a rather narrow 128-bit memory interface hampers frame rates at higher resolutions with MSAA enabled. Nevertheless, GeForce GTX 650 Ti is the highest-performing $150 card on the market
.
You might think that this fact alone would earn the GeForce GTX 650 Ti an easy recommendation. But AMD's counter-strike cannot be ignored. A discounted 1 GB version of the Radeon HD 7850 for $170. The 650 Ti is quite a bit slower, and saving $20 doesn't make up the difference. Nvidia's other issue is that street prices on the GeForce GTX 650 Ti are notably higher than $155. We'd want to see wider availability in the $140 to $150 range for this new card to earn more than an honorable mention.
Finally, the GeForce GTX 660 employs an uncut version of the same GK106 processor, giving it 960 cores, 80 texture units, and three ROP partitions. It sports a 980 MHz core clock rate and 1502 MHz GDDR5 memory on an aggregate 192-bit interface. Selling for $230, it's very attractive next to a $250 Radeon HD 7870. But because it takes a performance hit when MSAA is applied, it shares our recommendation around $240 with AMD's Radeon card.by don woligroski