Sparkle GeForce GTX 650 Ti Dragon Series review

1. Introduction2. Sparkle Geforce GTX650Ti Dragon Series3. Testing Methodology & Overclocking4. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark5. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage6. Synthetic: 3DMark 117. Gaming: 3DMark8. Gaming: Alien V Predator (DX11)9. Gaming: Total War Shogun 2 (DX11)10. Gaming: Far Cry 2 (DX10)11. Gaming: Far Cry 3 (DX11)12. Gaming: Dirt Showdown (DX11)13. Gaming: Sleeping Dogs (DX11)14. Gaming: Max Payne 3 (DX11)15. Technical: Thermal Dynamics16. Technical: Acoustics Performance17. Technical: Power Consumption18. Technical: Overclocking19. Closing Thoughts20. View All Pages

For our review today we are using an overclocked liquid cooled Core i7 3960X system. We are using the latest Catalyst 13.1 driver for the AMD cards, and the latest Nvidia 310.90 driver for the Sparkle GeForce GTX 650 Ti Dragon Series graphics card.

We have not yet adopted Windows 8 for these reviews, as the polls on our home page and Facebook page show it is extremely unpopular with our audience. We will address this again in a couple of months time when the new operating system has had time to mature.

Test System:
Processor: Core i7 3960 X Extreme Edition @ 4.4ghz
Graphics Card: Sparkle GTX650 Ti Dragon Series
Cooler: Antec 920 H20
Memory: 16GB G.Skill 2,400mhz @ 10-11-10-30
Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme
Power Supply: Seasonic Platinum 1,000W
Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive
Chassis: Lian Li PC-A77FR Aluminium Red Full Tower Case
Boot Drive: Patriot WildFire 120GB
Secondary Drive: 1TB Samsung
Monitors: Dell U3011.

Comparison Cards:
MSI GTX660 OC Edition
HIS HD7950 IceQ
Sapphire HD7870 W/Boost Tahiti LE

Software:
Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark

Games:
Max Payne 3 (DX 11)
Far Cry 2 (DX 10)
Far Cry 3 (DX 11)
Total War: Shogun 2 (DX 11)
Dirt Showdown (DX 11)
Sleeping Dogs (DX 11)
Alien V Predator (DX 11)

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.

Some game descriptions are edited from Wikipedia.

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