Introduction

The other day we got a chance to look at the MSI GTX 650 1GB Power Edition and while we didn't find ourselves completely in love with the model, we did start overclocking the card before we had completely finished writing the final thoughts. It was here we made note that we found ourselves quite impressed with what was going on in the overclocking department.

Today the overclocking side of things is exactly what we're going to be looking at as we use MSI Afterburner to see what exactly we managed to get out of the card. A strong overclock, though, shouldn't come as too much of a shock as the model does fall under the Power Edition series from MSI; a series that has always managed to impress us no matter what level of card it's implemented at.

Of course one of the biggest features to the Power Edition series is the Triple Over-Voltage ability. Normally what we see is a video card allows voltage adjustment that is limited to just the core. Of course that's always the most important area as the increased core clock is what brings with it the greatest gains, but the Power Edition series like the HAWK and Lightning ones bring with it the ability to adjust the AUX and Memory voltages as well.

Along with improved components on the card we tend to find these MSI offerings overclock better than others so when it comes to getting the best possible performance often we see MSI come out ahead of the competition.

While normally we'd move into the package and the card itself because we've already looked at the card in detail we'll simply be just getting into the overclocking side of things. Once we've done that we'll jump straight into the Test System Setup, cover the cards that will be included in our graphs today and then get stuck into the performance side of things.

Overclocking

Out of the box a reference GTX 650 comes with a 1058MHz core and the 1GB of GDDR5 comes in at 5000MHz QDR. The pre-overclocked Power Edition from MSI sees the same memory clock speed, but the core gets a slight bump to 1124MHz.

Looking above you can see we managed to push the core to a massive 1329MHz and the 1GB of GDDR5 got a really nice increase to 5920MHz QDR. This is a really nice boost in numbers and should hopefully bring with it a strong increase in performance.

Before we see just what the card did, though, we need to quickly look at our testbed and look at what cards will be included in our graphs today.