It feels kind of surreal, but I now have one of the Zotac 1650 cards. I worked up the confidence to get the Newegg offering (thanks
@CottonTexas !), and it was shipped to me from Abbotsford, British Columbia.
No problems with the shipment, arrived in perfect quality. (I kind of expected that there would be combo English/French documentation on the box, but it appears this unit was not labeled following Canadian rules; it was just English.) The low-profile bracket fit perfectly (take that, MSI!), and I had no problem installing it in my machine. (I did have a problem getting the appropriate Linux Nvidia drivers, but that was my own fault for manually playing around with drivers a few months ago. Once I cleaned up my mess, the drivers installed just fine.)
The card works beautifully. It is replacing my trusty-but-ancient GT 730 in this particular box; I was somewhat surprised to find that simple desktop operations were snappier right off. I thought the speed improvements would only be visible in graphics-intensive games, but it looks like this is going to produce improvements throughout most operations.
One thing I do want to note, about the noise level. I've yet to push this card very hard yet, but I can say that at 70% speed, the fans are noticeable. But not what I myself would call "loud". I'll have to see what 100% sounds like.
However, at 40% speed, I can't hear them at all!
I've done a little testing with a decibel meter on my phone. The GT 730 was, for all intents and purposes, silent: I measured 35 decibels at my seat when it was running. Ambient noise in this room mainly comes from the system fans of two computers. After installing the Zotac, at the 40% (minimum) speed, the app was able to detect it, barely: the average volume rose to 36 decibels. Once I got the fan speed all the way up to 70%, the app showed an average of about 42 decibels.
So, for now, I'm happy with the product. Time to start pushing it and see what happens...
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