INTRODUCTION

   With the recent release of the GeForce series 7 graphics cards NVIDIA has once again taken the crown for the single most powerful graphics processing unit and although many of us hope that AMD can bring something to match them soon for the sake of competition (and in turn lower prices) things are not that easy. Regardless however although all three cards announced in the series 7 are quite remarkable not everyone has the ability to get one and so with series 6 prices naturally taking a significant hit this just might be the best time for people to invest on one of the previous generation models. Today on our test bench we have the last addition in the GeForce series 6 line by Gainward the 650 Ti BOOST 2GB Golden Sample.

   Gainward Co. Ltd was founded in Taipei back in 1984 with a single goal, to produce a variety of innovative PC video enhancement products. In 1989 Gainward starts production of new VGA technology and becomes a major developer for Tseng Labs ASIC in Taiwan. Their USA presence was officialized in 1991 and by 1992 Gainward was ranked Top 1000 Industrial companies in Taiwan. TNC Industrial Co. Ltd. merged with Gainward in 1997 and with that move they became one of the largest graphics cards suppliers, shipping more than 2 million boards during the year. In 2000 Gainward establishes their presence in Europe with a new branch in Germany while in 2001 they become an NVIDIA Certified Selection Solution Provider and NVIDIA Launch Partner. Gainward and Palit Microsystem Inc. merge together in 2005 to ensure a higher level of accessibility and the highest possible product quality. In 2006 they introduce a new company logo which they change again in 2008 when they become an AMD authorized partner.

   Under the hood of the 650 Ti BOOST we find the GK106 graphics processor featuring 768 Shader units, 24 ROPs (Raster Operators), 64 TMUs (texture memory units) and 2540 million transistors along with 2GB (2048) GDDR5 RAM. Much like every Golden Sample graphics card by Gainward the 650 Ti BOOST 2GB GS comes overclocked from the factory and thus features a core clock speed of 1006MHz (boost up to 1072 MHz) and a memory clock set at 3054MHz (6108MHz effective) which in turn translates to a total of 146.6GB/s memory bandwidth. Worth mentioning is that the overclock given by Gainward is one of the highest factory overclocks currently available for the GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST 2GB so that alone should go a long way especially for people who will don't intent on spending time on overclocking. Now since we haven't been focusing on graphics card reviews lately we can only place it up against a handful of cards but that should be more than just sufficient to see just how good this solution by Gainward really is.