14 DAY TRIAL // Right now, many consumers are waiting for the next-generation graphics cards from Advanced Micro Devices and NVIDIA, which means that OEMs have to really put an effort in the designs of existing boards if they are to charm customers and make them decide against waiting.
Fortunately, Gigabyte can say it has an easier time of achieving this, at least as far as NVIDIA-based adapters are concerned.
While AMD does have an entire Radeon HD 8000 series coming up (reports of a delay to Q4 notwithstanding), NVIDIA only has the GeForce Titan top-tier.
Obviously, a high-grade board like that one, that has a better performance than the GeForce GTX 690 dual-GPU board, won't affect mainstream model sales in any way.
Gigabyte still made an unusual design choice though, when it put together the GV-N650D5-1GI (1 GB) and GV-N650D5-2GI (2 GB).
They are variations of the GeForce GTX 650 with fans of 100 mm in diameter.
For the sake of comparison, most boards have one or two 92 mm or 80 mm fans, but we digress.
The newcomers have bulky aluminum heatsinks and Ultra Durable 2 PCBs (printed circuit boards). They are also identical except in VRAM capacity.
That means that both get the 28nm GK107 graphics processing unit (with 384 CUDA cores) and identical clock speeds.
Speaking of which, Gigabyte did not overclock the newcomers at all. It was more than satisfied with the reference specifications, of 1,058 MHz for the GPU and 5 GHz for the VRAM.
As for connectivity, Gigabyte implemented dual-link DVI, HDMI (gold-plated connector) and D-Sub ports (VGA).
Finally, the GV-N650D5-1GI (1 GB) and GV-N650D5-2GI (2 GB) have 6-pin PCI Express power connectors (one each), since they need more energy than what is provided through the PCIe port itself.
Sales should start soon, for $100 / 75-100 Euro (1 GB) and $130 / 97-130 Euro (2 GB).