The performance of the card: "A little beast"

While I spent years Geforce 9600GT and umgelabelten successor as GT240 have previously etc. considered to be the measure of all things at the price / performance ratio, it is finally the detachment arrived! More features, more power, significantly lower power consumption and even cheaper. The whole by the gigabyte "Ultra Durable" technology with liquid electrolyte capacitors without, gold-plated HDMI connector, etc. The future is durable finally here!

Interestingly, I found that Gigabyte has released a graphics card that does not appear so in this configuration, the official Nvidia page. The technical data can be, especially when you consider that this is a map for "little money", can certainly melt in your mouth:

- 384 Cuda cores
- 901 MHz core clock speed
- 2 GB of memory, and that GDDR5 (!)
- By 40 GB / second of peak memory bandwidth
- With only 23 Watt TDP.

I have installed the card in my Dell Inspiron and am thrilled. At first it struck me: pleasantly quiet. In contrast to the previous map, I hear this card at all. The computer seems to me just as quietly, as if I'd run him without a graphics card with the onboard graphics.

Then the image quality. I turned on the driver antialiasing FXAA. And then the edges are smoothed with all desktop fonts and even in the oldest pinball games. Even if the games actually no anti-aliasing can. And my age-old games like Unreal Tournament III, Serious Sam II, etc. run absolutely smoothly in the highest quality settings and despite FXAA antialiasing. Just out of interest, I then, once made the 3DMark06, which I had on the plate a test run. More than 11,000 points! As could have been earlier but already a "Super-Dooper-HiTech" need to buy card, to just come close to such regions.

A little warning before someone the "wrong" GT 730 buys. There are three fundamentally different from Nvidia cards, all with the type designation "GT 730".

There are cards in which memory speed, memory size and wattage are identical. With a single, but very important difference: there is no GDDR5 memory installed, but DDR3 memory (sometimes called GDDR3). This type of memory is much slower. Due to this small difference, the memory bandwidth of 40 then goes back to slightly over 14 (!) GB / s. And the actual graphics processor can not bring power, because he just can not zoom in and get rid of the data fast enough. The chip "starving" literally, because he is not served by the memory fast enough and can not show what it can do.

Then there is a "GT 730", which also works with DDR3 memory and since the memory with 128-bit data width is tethered. This is far better because the memory bandwidth then rises to about 28 GB / s. So far so good. But exactly this type of card then works with the older chip design of the previous generation, has only 701 MHz core clock speed and only 96 instead of 384 Cuda cores. Clearly, then, the performance is significantly worse.

Here the manufacturer Gigabyte has done everything right. Combines the correct chip with the correct memory and it even 2GB. Although there after the official Nvidia side is supposed to be only card with 1GB of memory. For me it is clear, this combination of graphics chips with faster memory comes in terms of performance in orders of magnitude before, which should remain actually reserved the next larger chips. And is even faster than a number of more expensive cards if they are equipped only with the slower DDR3 memory.