NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 750 & 750 Ti Offer Great Performance – No Power Connector Needed

Getting excited about sub-$150 graphics cards is sometimes tough, I admit. I blame it on the fact that I deal with higher-end cards on a regular basis, an experience I’m sure a Ferrari driver can relate to when he has to relegate himself to a golf cart whilst shooting for that elusive birdie.

Back in December, though, AMD’s Radeon R7 260 helped change that perception. When looked at from the right angle, a sub-$150 graphics card can be cool… even exciting. Today, with the release of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 750 and 750 Ti, that same feeling of excitement is coming over me.

Just take a look:

Yes – it’s simple to look at, but that’s kind of the point. It’s a modest card. But that being said, it’s not too modest in performance. NVIDIA is targeting the 750 Ti at users who are still kicking it with a card like the 550 Ti – a card that the company says is half as fast as the 750 Ti.

But here’s what makes the 750 Ti impressive: It’s a 60W offering, and doesn’t have a power connector. That aforementioned 550 Ti? It does. And not to mention, the 550 Ti is much larger, whereas the 750 Ti can get away with a much simpler cooler.

I’ll be publishing a look at the 750 Ti soon, but for now, let’s take a look at a couple quick facts and other basics. As mentioned, NVIDIA is targeting the card at those who are running aging budget cards. It might have just been a couple of years since the 550 Ti came out, but we’re talking about 2x the performance at almost half the power requirement.

The biggest reason this kind of advancement matters to me is that I’ve talked to a lot over people over the years who’ve been burned by their OEM PC. It either doesn’t have a PSU that offers an available PCIe power connector, or it doesn’t have enough power to handle anything other than the lowest of the low-end card that it came with. With a product like the 750 Ti, or the 750, it’s now a problem with a viable, even attractive, solution. As it turns out, NVIDIA had this in mind as well:

Many of the OEM systems that our customers are using don’t ship with large power supplies. Take a $500 HP Pavilion 500-200t desktop PC for example–it ships with a 300W power supply. For folks using a system like this, the GeForce GTX 750 Ti is the most powerful GPU upgrade option available to them and gives them a great way to upgrade to 1080p gaming, without having to shoulder the expense of installing a new power supply in addition to the cost of the GPU. It also gives them a great entry point to the GeForce GTX ecosystem which today includes GeForce Experience, GameStream, ShadowPlay and more, with newer features planned for the future.

As that blurb suggests, the GTX 750 (and Ti) supports things like GeForce Experience, GameStream, and ShadowPlay (a feature I’m starting to not want to live without).

That all covered, let’s see where these new cards fall into NVIDIA’s lineup:

It’s almost as though AMD and NVIDIA have access to each other’s roadmaps (nah…), as AMD just last week announced its $149 Radeon R7 265, and this week, NVIDIA announces its $149 GTX 750 Ti. That factoid aside, both 750s are quite similar overall, with the Ti model boosting the core count by 25% and memory by 100MHz. The other difference is with the power draw – a mere 5 watts between them.

I’ll talk more in detail about NVIDIA’s purpose for the GTX 750 and Ti in the full review, amongst other things, but to wrap this post up, I’ll share a look at all of the stock images we were supplied showing what the different vendors will be bringing to the table (note that this is not all; some vendors have more than one variant).

As a reminder, my look at the GTX 750 Ti will come soon. Stay tuned.