Nvidia’s upcoming GeForce GTX 1650 might not require a power cable

Update: The GeForce GTX 1650 review is now live, if you want to know more.

There are plenty of rumors pointing to Nvidia releasing a GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card in the near future, and just last week, we assembled them into a tidy article covering price, specs, release date, and everything we know about the GTX 1650, including the expected power requirements. Since then, a batch of press renders have found their way to the web, and it looks like the GTX 1650 might not require a dedicated power cable from your PSU, just as we surmised.

The folks at Videocardz got their mitts on a batch of what look to be official press renders of a Zotac model. According to the box art, the GTX 1650 will indeed ship with 4GB of GDDR5 memory, as we had been hearing.

Image courtesy of Videocardz. Click for original.

What's interesting though is what's not seen. The renders show the card from multiple angles, and none of them reveal a PCIe power connector on the card. If that is indeed the case, then the 75W provided from a PCIe x16 slot will be sufficient to power the card.

Zotac's renders aren't always great about showing PCIe connectors in clear view—on some current generation cards, the renders show a cutout where the connector is tucked away, but not the actual connector itself. However, the GTX 1650 images don't even show a cutout.

It wouldn't be surprising if the GTX 1650 arrived without a 6-pin (or 8-pin) PCIe connector. The current generation GTX 1050 Ti and 1050 can both draw power from the PCIe slot as well (though some overclocked models still include a 6-pin connector), and that is our expectation for the GTX 1650. It's possible, and even likely, that some overclocked models will need more power, though at that point, you're probably better offer stepping up to a GTX 1660.

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).