The gaming console market has been growing at an alarming rate. But that’s not to say PC gaming has died off a natural death. There’s a growing community of gaming enthusiasts and hardcore gamers that still trust and rely on PC for their gaming sessions and LAN parties.

That’s enough encouragement for graphics card manufacturers to keep churning out one graphics card after the other. Now, gamers usually prefer graphics cards that are huge in size, coupled with coolers and fans to go with it. Nvidia seems to be on a task to change all of that with the launch of the new GeForce GTX 750 Ti.

This one’s almost the same size as the 650 Ti, and comes built on a less than 6-inch PCB. The only major difference would be, looks-wise of course, the orb-style heat sink and fan that’s bolted onto the card, in comparison to the huge cooler that came with the 650 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 750 Ti is based on the 28 nm GM107 (GeForce-Maxwell 107) silicon. This 1.87 billion-transistor GPU features a basic component hierarchy that’s not too different from that of “Kepler,” but sees some under-the-hood changes in the design of its key parallel processing sub-unit, the streaming multiprocessor “Maxwell” (SMM).

When the graphics card was launched, NVIDIA promised some huge performance-per-watt gains with “Maxwell.” Given that the GM107 is based on the same 28 nm process as the GeForce Kepler series, there’s only one way NVIDIA can deliver on its promise – by developing a better overall architecture. And looks like NVIDIA has succeeded in keeping up its promises. So if you are a HTPC owner or a Steam Box builder, this GPU is something you would want to take notice of.

Speaking about the GTX 750 Ti’s Maxwell architecture, the platform offers probably just limited set of features compared to Kepler. If we look at the performance part of the graphics card from a gaming perspective, Maxwell remains a Direct3D 11.0 compliant design, supporting the base 11.0 functionality along with many of the features required for Direct3D 11.1 and 11.2.

When it comes to display connectivity options, the GTX 750 Ti offers one mini-HDMI port and two DVI ports, one of which supports analog VGA output. You may use all outputs at the same time, so triple-monitor-surround gaming is possible with one card. The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible, which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support.

In addition, the GTX 750 Ti does not require any external PCI-Express power connector as all power (up to 75 W) is supplied via the PCI-Express slot. WE will not bore you with any more tech specs – but we will get straight to the overall performance of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti. This is one card that consumes far lesser power than most graphics cards at the price point it is available for.

We used Kill-A-Watt meter to check the total system power consumption. When it was idle, the GTX 750 Ti consumed around 51 watts of power with the display on or off. Even when we ran various benchmarking tests, the GTX 750 Ti consumed around 120w, which is a lot lower than most cards would consume.

The overall graphics performance was good, too – be it during gaming sessions or movie marathons. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 750 Ti, a graphics card based on the Maxwell architecture, provides some good performance, while consuming amazingly less power, eliminating the need for auxiliary power. Hence, this graphics card is certainly a must-have if you are looking at building small form factor PCs or upgrading an older PC.

Price: $119 for the GTX 750, $139 for the 1GB GTX 750 and $149 for the 2GB GTX 750 Ti.