After first appearances in February that the GTX 1650 would be receiving a GDDR6 memory upgrade, all the major vendors are now updating their GTX 1650 cards to the faster memory standard. The latest of these vendors is EVGA, which says you can expect a 5% performance bump with the new models.
EVGA's GTX 1650 GDDR6 comes in two flavors: an SC Ultra Gaming and an SC Ultra Black Gaming card. Both come with a dual-fan cooler and a neat backplate, which look refined. With a relatively small form factor, they will also fit nicely in smaller PCs.
The GDDR6 memory comes only as a 4 GB frame buffer, connected to the GPU over a 128-bit memory bus. Paired with a memory clock of 12 GHz, this translates to a memory bandwidth of 192 GB/s, which is a respectable uplift over the 128 GB/s bandwidth of the GDDR5-based GTX 1650.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | 1650 SC Ultra Gaming (GDDR6) | 1650 SC Ultra Gaming (GDDR5) | 1650 SC Ultra Black Gaming (GDDR6) | 1650 SC Ultra Black Gaming (GDDR5) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Boost Clock | 1710 MHz | 1860 MHz | 1605 MHz | 1665 MHz |
| Memory Type | GDDR6 | GDDR5 | GDDR6 | GDDR5 |
| Memory Interface | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit |
| Memory Clock | 12000 MHz | 8000 MHz | 12000 MHz | 8000 MHz |
Putting the equivalent versions of the cards side-by-side, it's clear that the new GDDR6 variants have lower boost clocks than their GDDR5 counterparts. Presumably, this is for two reasons: to stay within the Nvidia-specified power envelope, and to ensure that the GTX 1650 doesn't start eating into the GTX 1650 Super's territory. That being said, looking at the clock speeds, there appears to be a significant drop in the SC Ultra Gaming range, compared to the slightly inferior SC Ultra Black Gaming cards.
ExpReview tested a GDDR5 card against a GDDR6 GTX 1650, and found that there is roughly a 6% performance increase, though this was on two cards from different manufacturers with different coolers and different clocks. Nevertheless, this matches EVGA's promise of a 5 percent performance uplift.
EVGA's GTX 1650 SC Ultra Black Gaming GDDR6 is currently out of stock, but the faster GTX 1650 SC Ultra Gaming GDDR6 can be ordered straight from EVGA for $160.
