EVGA's Precision X1 software works with most Nvidia GPUs, just like MSI Afterburner. Whether it's monitoring or tuning your GPU, EVGA's software will get the job done and is one of the best tools for that purpose on Nvidia hardware. With the built-in OC scanner tool, it will even try to find a stable and relatively safe overclock.
EVGA GTX 1650 GDDR6 Overclocking
Most of the time, we don't find it necessary to push GPUs beyond the factory settings, but if you want to get a modest 5-10% bump in performance, you usually can. We started with a run of the OC scanner, which took about 30 minutes … and then Precision X1 crashed when we tried to save the resulting profile. Nice.
Rather than spending another 30 minutes, we decided the manual overclocking route was faster and easier. After tweaking the fan speed curve a bit to help with cooling, we then did some quick testing while looping Unigine Heaven 4.0 in a window and determined a reasonably 'safe' manual overclock consisted of +1000 MHz on the GDDR6 and +150 MHz on the GPU. That results in 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory clocks, which most cards and chips seem perfectly able to handle.
We ran through the 1080p medium tests on all of the games to confirm the overclock was (reasonably) stable, and see how much it helped performance. Here's the resulting performance summary:
| Game | Setting | EVGA 1650 GDDR6 OCed | EVGA GTX 1650 GDDR6 Stock | EVGA 1650 GDDR6 OCed vs. Stock |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9 Game Average (Geomean) | 1080p Medium | 83.3 / 61.0 | 78.0 / 58.0 | 6.7% / 5.1% |
| Borderlands 3 | 1080p Medium | 67.7 / 56.0 | 63.5 / 54.8 | 6.6% / 2.1% |
| The Division 2 | 1080p Medium | 83.5 / 68.0 | 78.6 / 65.8 | 6.3% / 3.4% |
| Far Cry 5 | 1080p Medium | 80.4 / 67.0 | 75.2 / 63.1 | 6.8% / 6.2% |
| Final Fantasy XIV | 1080p Medium | 103.5 / 51.0 | 96.3 / 46.8 | 7.5% / 8.9% |
| Forza Horizon 4 | 1080p Medium | 117.8 / 96.7 | 110.7 / 91.7 | 6.4% / 5.5% |
| Metro Exodus | 1080p Medium | 58.2 / 28.3 | 54.5 / 27.4 | 6.7% / 3.1% |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 | 1080p Medium | 69.8 / 58.7 | 65.0 / 55.3 | 7.3% / 6.1% |
| Shadow of the Tomb Raider | 1080p Medium | 71.2 / 54.6 | 67.9 / 52.3 | 4.8% / 4.5% |
| Strange Brigade | 1080p Medium | 120.2 / 102.7 | 111.1 / 96.3 | 8.1% / 6.6% |
While it's not our full test suite, the quick and dirty overclock of the EVGA GTX 1650 GDDR6 improved performance by 7% on average, with a few games showing up to an 8% increase in performance. Minimum fps doesn't improve quite as much, and the limited 4GB VRAM certainly plays a role in that.
Overclocking did increase power and temperatures a bit, but not as much as you might expect. Throughout the overclocked testing, we logged data using Powenetics, our graphics card power consumption tool, and found it averaged 87W of power use under load. The average GPU temperature was still only 61.5C, and average fan speed was 1814 RPM.
Nvidia GPUs dynamically adjust clock speed based on power and thermals, but we increased the power limit (to the maximum +6%), and the +150 MHz overclock appeared to directly correlate with clock speed: The card averaged 2070 MHz, where stock performance was 1916 MHz. That's a nice little overclock for a budget GPU.
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