MSI launches a couple of GTX 1650 cards that will fit inside a compact PC

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There are very few low profile Turing cards to choose from.

(Image credit: MSI)

MSI is giving Nvidia's Turing GPU the low profile treatment with a pair of new GeForce GTX 1650 graphics cards. One is an overclocked model and the other sticks to reference clocks, but both sit lower than almost every other GTX 1650 model on the market.

Low profile cards can come in handy when building a small form factor (SFF) gaming PC. Depending on the case, a low profile card can be a necessity. The problem is, they're not nearly as readily available as standard height cards.

That is what makes MSI's new models somewhat unique, at least to the vast majority of Turing models. The only low profile Turing card I'm aware of is from Zotac (ZT-T15600H-10L), and that is also a GTX 1650 model.

MSI's new models both measure 168 x 69 x 37 mm with the low profile bracket. The only difference is that the regular model (GeForce GTX 1650 4GT LP) has a 1665MHz boost clock and the overclocked version (GeForce GTX 1650 GT LP OC) gooses the boost clock to 1695MHz. That's just a 30MHz clockspeed difference. While overclocking is never guaranteed, you can probably achieve the same 1695MHz boost clock on the regular model by manually overclocking it, provided your case offers sufficient airflow and cooling.

For the sake of comparison, Zotac's model measures 160 x 111.15 x 34 mm and has two cooling fans, same as MSI's new offerings. It also has a 1665MHz boost clock.

The GTX 1650 is the lowest end Turing card that currently exists, nestunder the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti, among its brethren that lack dedicated RT and Tensor cores (non-RTX cards, in other words). In his testing, Jarred found it to be around 50 percent faster than a previous generation GTX 1050, and capable of hitting 60 fps at 1080p medium to high quality settings in most games. At $149 MSRP, however, it costs more than a GTX 1050 Ti (which is the model that it really replaces).

MSI did not say how much its new low profile models will cost or when they will be available.

Paul Lilly
Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).