Gigabyte GeForce GT 1030 2GB OC Graphics Card

Gigabyte GeForce GT 1030 2GB OC Graphics Card

Gigabyte GT 1030 2GB

Gigabyte GeForce GT 1030 2GB OC Review

Although we might have hoped for better performance in taxing graphics workloads, Nvidia’s GeForce GT 1030 performs admirably in the competitive gaming titles it was designed to service. Moreover, a low price, power-friendly architecture, and compelling form factor make the card accessible to just about anyone with an available PCIe slot.

Gigabyte sent over its GeForce GT 1030 Low Profile 2G to represent Nvidia’s latest addition. The card ships with a full-sized slot bracket in place, but it includes a half-height bracket for slim enclosures as well. Although our sample is actively cooled, Gigabyte also sells a passive model sporting the same clock rates. Low-profile and passively-cooled? Yup.

Gigabyte GT 1030 2GB TDP is a mere 30W, so we can already guess that power consumption, thermals, and acoustics will be some of this board’s advantages over the competition. But can it keep up in our benchmark suite? After all, that’s what determines whether the GT 1030 succeeds GT 730 in our list of gaming graphics cards.

Gigabyte GT 1030 2GB utilizes an all-new graphics processor called GP108, composed of 1.8 billion transistors. It’s a teeny thing at just 70mm², thanks to the same 14nm FinFET process used to manufacture GP107. Compare that to GeForce GT 730’s GK208 chip with 1.02 billion transistors in an 84mm² die. Or how about the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, which we’re making the GT 1030 battle in today’s benchmarks? That card’s GM107 GPU has a similar transistor count as GP108, but in a 148mm² die, owing to its 28nm manufacturing process.

Here’s the thing, though: whereas Gigabyte GT 1030 2GB employs five Streaming Multiprocessors, GT 1030 comes equipped with three. Given 128 CUDA cores per SM/SMM in the Pascal and Maxwell architectures, that’s 384 cores for GT 1030 and 640 for GTX 750 Ti. Both designs also expose eight texture units per SM, totaling 24 on GeForce GT 1030, while GTX 750 Ti gets 40. The two GPUs feature a pair of ROP partitions, giving you up to 16 32-bit integer pixels per clock. However, those partitions are aligned with 256KB slices of L2 cache on GP108 and 1MB slices of L2 on GM107. That means GeForce GT 1030 includes 512KB L2 total—a big reduction from GTX 750 Ti’s 2MB. And whereas GeForce GTX 750 Ti utilizes two 64-bit memory controllers, GT 1030’s specs break the memory bus down into a pair of 32-bit controllers, adding up to a 64-bit interface. That’s a lot of lost resources for a ~4% difference in complexity.

Nvidia goes a long way to overcoming those deficits in GT 1030 with higher clock rates. Our sample employs a 1227 MHz base frequency and a typical GPU Boost rating of 1468 MHz. In contrast, GeForce GTX 750 Ti starts at 1020 MHz and boosts just slightly to 1085 MHz. Of course, a 64-bit aggregate memory bus cripples GT 1030’s peak bandwidth to 48 GB/s using 6 Gb/s GDDR5; GTX 750 Ti’s wider interface facilitates up to 86.4 GB/s.

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