JANUARY 2020 PCWorld 59our benchmark testing later.
Packing so much more potency into the
new-look Super also negates the biggest
selling point for the vanilla GTX 1650: The
ability to run without any extra power cables.
While baseline models of the original 75-watt
GeForce GTX 1650 can draw their power from
your PC’s motherboard alone, making them
ideal for turning office machines into easy-
peasy gaming rigs, the 100W GTX 1650 Super
demands a supplemental six-pin power
connector. Most existing gaming rigs and
standalone power supplies should easily meet
that need, however, and the $150 non-Super
GTX 1650 is still sticking around for people
who can’t manage the extra power
connection. (Given how much more powerful
the GTX 1650 Super is for just $10 more, we’re
hoping the original gets a price cut soon.)and well, just more
everything.
It also includes
Nvidia’s newer and
much more efficient
“Turing” Encoder,
after the company
received criticism
over saddling the
original GTX 1650
with its last-gen
encoder. “Turing
NVENC is up to 15
percent more
efficient—requiring
15 percent less bitrate at the same quality
level—than previous-generation Pascal
NVENC when encoding with H.264, and 25
percent for HEVC,” Nvidia’s reviewer’s guide
says. “In other words, you get an instant
upgrade in image quality without having to
bump up your streaming rate.” EposVox, an
excellent source for streaming reviews and
information, tested Turing NVENC (go.
pcworld.com/nven) in RTX GPUs and called it
“beyond impressive.”
This is a substantial overhaul, in other
words. Merely swapping out the original
GeForce GTX 1660’s slower GDDR5 memory
for cutting-edge GDDR6 was enough to give
it a solid performance boost, so pairing that
with a significant GPU upgrade should help
propel the GTX 1650 Super far beyond the
vanilla GTX 1650—and it does, as you’ll see in