ASUS ENGT430 GEFORCE GT 430 VIDEOCARD REVIEW


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Date: December 8th, 2010
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Asus
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PRODUCT PICTORIAL & WALKTHROUGH

Let's take a virtual walk around Asus' faster version of Nvidia's Geforce GT430.

First off we start at this videocard's VPU. Asus' use of the 40nm manufactured GF108 core is stock clocked at 700Mhz core, 1400Mhz shader and 1600Mhz 128bit DDR3 memory which is capable of 25.6Mb's memory transfer. This coupled with the VPU's 96 Unified shaders, 16 ROP and 32 texture filtering units draws ~175watts during maximum load. Although this might not seems like much and most people will never challenge this videocard to go to 100% during any type of everyday use, it is almost twice as power hungry as the GT240 it is replacing in the near future.

The spiral type Cooler attached to the GF108 VPU uses a directly cooled design which blows the warmed air out from the center of the card equally in all directions. This also aids in properly cooling the onboard 1Gb of DDR3 memory surrounding the VPU area. But with this being said, this card does exhaust its air into the case so make sure your build has some sort of active internal case ventilation.

The back of the card is completely void of any obstruction to interfere with any sort of upper motherboard components and facilitated an easy install. As you can see, this cooling solution was securely held in place with 3 screws and insures that there won't be anyway that this cooler will be separating away from any of the components it is cooling even during rough handling.

Last but not least in this section is the main connection panel. You have three choices which consist of one DVI, one analog VGA and one HDMI video connection. Although I like the selection, I would still consider two DVI ports to be the standard for today's display technology instead of the one lone analog connection. some user's may want to use this card in a dual monitor environment and more and more monitor manufacturers are completely dropping analog VGA support.

In most HTPC builds, I understand the HDMI connection will be the choice of more users so they can take advantage of the ENGT430's native Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Master Audio.