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Geforce Gt 430 Video Card

The latest generation of video cards are (at the time of writing) the AMD Radeon 7000 series and the nVidia Geforce GTX 500 series, but there are a lot of video cards in the previous generation which are still very much competitive from both AMD and nVidia.

The nVidia Geforce Geforce GT 430 video card is not one of them, as its price is around 60 USD, just a few bucks away from the AMD Radeon 5550 and Radeon 6570 models. Unfortunately for nVidia, these two video cards are far superior to the Geforce GT 430, as they require about 30% less power and offer about 40% better 3D performance.

Geforce Gt 430 Video Card (Source: hothardware.com)

As the nVidia Geforce GT 430 video card model is part of the low-end sector (in fact it's the slowest from the GT/GTX/GTS 400 series), so its main feature is its low-profile shape, which makes it an ideal video card for slim HTPC computer configurations, if the user is a loyal nVidia fan. The video card in the picture above is made by ASUS, with a relatively large heatsink and a small (and also noisy) cooling fan.

Naturally this cooling solution needs to be replaced in quiet HTPC solutions, as these small fans are aways louder than anything else in a midrange desktop computer configuration. Personally I would attach a 6cm fan to the existing heatsink, and run it with only 5-7 Volts, in order to further reduce the noise level.

Geforce Gt 430 Video Card (Source: blogcdn.com)

The original nVidia Geforce GT 430 video card comes with a better cooling solution, which runs at a lower RPM and can also be rewired to 5-7 Volts if necessary. The scores obtained by the nVidia Geforce GT 430 video cards are a bit misleading, as 3DMark06 for example places them in first place, with about 5% higher scores than AMD's rival video card models. Unfortunately this isn't at all accurate, because most game benchmarks show a 40-50% higher performance level with AMD Radeon 5550/5570/6570 video cards. This means that the GT 430 video card has some parts that work much better than its rivals', but a design flaw (bottleneck) holds it back when it comes to everyday 3D games. The introduction of the Geforce GT 520 video card, nVidia has managed to compete with AMD's Radeon 6450 video card in both performance and power consumption.

There is one possible configuration in which the nVidia Geforce GT 430 video card can perform really well: in SLI mode. By installing two of these video cards in one HTPC with two available PCI-Express 16X slots, the performance simply doubles. This impressive performance gain can only be achieved with low-end and midrange video cards, as high-end parts are held back by the limitations of the SLI and Crossfire technologies' maximum bus speeds, thus giving you just a 50-80% performance gain after you spend 100% more on two video cards.