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Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650 GDDR6 GPU gets another new variant, the TU116-150 silicon


Buying a GTX 1650 GPU these days can get confusing. Currently there are 4 variants of this graphics chip from Nvidia. If you don’t look closely at the manufacturer’s specifications, then you may end up buying a wrong SKU.

The original GeForce GTX 1650 GPU rocked the TU117 silicon, and the GPU’s 896 CUDA cores were attached to 4GB of 8Gbps GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit memory interface bus. After a year later, Nvidia rolled out the same card having a GDDR6 Memory type, and this variant came with a faster 12Gbps GDDR6 memory, which actually allowed the graphics card to deliver up to 50% higher memory bandwidth, despite lower clock speeds. The GDDR6 upgrade boosted the performance up to 10-15% over the vanilla GTX 1650 GDDR5 SKU.

After that two more new variants were found in AIDA64’s release notes, the GeForce GTX 1650 TU116 and GeForce GTX 1650 TU106 respectively, both having the GDDR6 memory type. The suffix indicates the type of silicon die being used, which is either TU116 or TU106. Both cards rock 896 Shading units or CUDA cores. The TU116 die is the same as found in other GTX 16-series SKUs, including the GTX 1650 Super, GTX 1660, GTX 1660 Super and GTX 1660 Ti. The TU106 die, on the other hand is present inside the GeForce RTX 20-series cards, such as the GeForce RTX 2060, RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070. But unlike the TU116 and TU117, the TU106 die comes with Nvidia’s TENSOR and RT cores.

Now, a new GTX 1650 GDDR6 variant with TU116-150 GPU die has been spotted by the hardware leaker, @momomo_us. This also appears to be a cut-down GPU variant, since the TU116 die is the same as found in other GTX 16-series SKUs, including the GTX 1650 Super, GTX 1660, GTX 1660 Super and GTX 1660 Ti. The 150 suffix implies that this particular GPU is having fewer cores than the full silicon.

@momomo_us has posted a picture of this new die, which belongs to a Gigabyte model GPU (GV-N1656OC-4GD R2.0). This appears to be a new Revision Model. NVIDIA has also released a TU106-125 variant of this GPU for the Chinese/Asian market, and this card comes with a slightly higher TDP at 90 Watts. So, there you have it. Not every GTX 1650 GDDR6 is the same. So finally we have four/five variants of the GTX 1650 card, which can also get a bit confusing.

The end user or gamer needs to be aware of the specs before buying, but everyone is not that tech-savvy, so they might end up buying a wrong card/SKU in the end. The picture of this new die can be seen below.

NVIDIA GTX 1650 GDDR6 TU116