The GTX 650 Ti Boost is really what nVidia and it's customers needed the most: A sub-200-Euro/sub-200-CHF card that offers great performance. But unfortunately it arrives on the market a bit too late. The MSRP is looking very good when you check at other cards' MSRP but when you look at the market prices it's completely different. The GTX 650 Ti Boost goes retail today priced at 169 € when you can find custom versions of the HD 7870 and HD 7850 - more performance - starting at 170 € and 154 € respectively with Bioshock Infinite and the latest Tomb Raider bundled.

Performance is on a good level but as we've already mentioned, it is not enough if you put the price into the equation too. On average the HD 7850 2GB is 5.6 percent faster and the HD 7870 is 27 percent faster. You can even find the GTX 660 which is 15 percent faster for 170 Euro these days.
When it comes to the cooler, nVidia equips its card with the exact same cooler you find on the GTX 670/660 reference. It's an adequate cooler for a card in this performance segment but it's not perfect. While temperatures were on a good level the noise wasn't. In idle the fan doesn't go below 30 % fan speed. At this speed the card is silent but audible. Under load the noise was a bit too high too. It was as noisy as the reference GTX 670/660 Ti, which are cards that play in another league.
The power consumption in idle is really good. Our entire setup wasn't drawing more than 51 Watts, which is remarkable. Under load we measured 184 Watts which is quite high if you consider non reference cards. Both our non reference HD 7870 and GTX 660 were more efficient for exemple.