Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 And 660 Review: Kepler At $110 And $230

Features
By published

We have two new graphics cards in the lab today: Nvidia's GeForce GTX 650 and 660, filling the gap between its GeForce GT 640 and GTX 660 Ti with Kepler derivatives. Are these GK107- and GK106-based boards able to challenge the Radeon HD 7750 and 7850?

Benchmark Results: Battlefield 3

Sub-$150 cards like the GeForce GTX 650 can only handle Battlefield 3's Low detail preset, which is a little disappointing. The resulting image quality still looks good, though, and is at least intensive enough to tax these boards. AMD's Radeon cards perform well, and the HD 7750 edges out Nvidia's GeForce GTX 650.

Stepping up to a GeForce GTX 660 gives you the ability to go from Low to Ultra quality. At this more demanding setting, Nvidia's latest is able to outmaneuver AMD's Radeon HD 7870.

The 7850 falls much closer to the boundary of unplayability, skirting 30 FPS and dipping as low as 28 FPS at times.

Don Woligroski
Contributor

Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.