Evga GeForce GT 430 1024 MB DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 DVI/HDMI/VGA Graphics Card, 01G-P3-1430-LR

by EVGA

• 700 MHz core clock
• PCI Express 2.0
• 1024 MB 128-bit DDR3 memory
• 1400 MHz memory clock and 1400 MHz shader clock
• 96 CUDA Cores

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 2 x 4.4 inches ; 12 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0046HAW7Y
• Item model number: 01G-P3-1430-LR
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (185 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 5, 2010

Product Description

GeForce your PC with the EVGA GT 430 and get the ultimate performance upgrade. Tap into the horsepower of the GPU for a visually-charged boost on your favorite applications. Edit your photos and HD videos and push the limits of your web experience with a new generation of GPU-accelerated browsers. Level-up your game with the next-generation gaming architecture built from the ground up for DirectX 11. Take the latest 3D movies home with Blu-ray 3D and GeForce. All this and more at an excellent value. The EVGA GT 430 features 96 CUDA Cores, a high speed DDR3 memory interface with 1024MB onboard and full DirectX 11 support providing breathtaking image quality. NVIDIA PhysX and CUDA technologies power realistic effects for an interactive gaming experience. Specifications include 700 MHz core clock, 1024MB (1GB) of DDR3 memory with a 1400 MHz memory clock and 22.4 GB/second memory bandwidth, 128 bit memory bit width, 1400 MHz Shader Clock, 96 CUDA cores, and PCI Express 2.0 compatibility. Additional features include Microsoft DirectX 11 Support, NVIDIA PhysX Technology, Blu-Ray 3D Support, Hardware Video Decode Acceleration, NVIDIA CUDA technology with CUDA C/C++, DirectCompute 5.0, and OpenCL support, PCI-Express 2.0 support, OpenGL 4.0 support, Dual Link HDCP capability, TrueHD and DTS-HD Audio Bitstreaming Support and Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7 support. Connections are HDMI 1.4a and Dual-Link DVI-I. Package includes the EVGA Driver/software disc with EVGA Precision Tuning utility and a limited 2 year warranty if registered within 30 days at www.evga.com.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

211 of 217 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Pretty much the HTPC holy grail. A fantastic bargain. January 8, 2011

By Beebeard

Amazon Verified Purchase

When Nvidia released the GT 430 reference design in the last quarter of 2010, hardware pundits everywhere were amazed by the card's potential. Here was a bitstreaming video card, bulging with electronic muscle, with a respectably low power footprint. In short, it was the perfect HTPC video card. The only problem was that Nvidia's offering was a little slow to market, and after a barrage of price drops on comparable ATI products, the initial price point of the GT 430 was a little high for what you were getting.

Flash forward to the present, and the price on the GT 430 cards is dropping...dropping...dropping. As they move farther away from the $100 mark and closer to the $50 mark, the cards have shaped up into one heck of a nice deal. I love mine. In fact, I would marry mine if the state I lived in somehow allowed it. We would live in a log cabin together and sell crafts to tourists. Just me and the GT 430 against the world. No worries, no regrets. I...I love you, GT 430. Let's never fight.

PROS:

- It laughs at your 1080p HD videos. Laughs at them, pushes them down, and takes their lunch money. The card has enough horsepower to play back some kind of crazy, as-yet-undiscovered 5000p video stream, let alone whatever weak 1080p kung fu you'd like to throw at it. Your media center is going to be future-proofed for quite some time. I put this card in a 780G-based motherboard with onboard ATI HD 3200 graphics--considered some of the best onboard graphics available just a few years back--and the GT 430 just destroys it. Sure, discrete graphics solutions are generally going to be faster than onboard video, this is well-known, but the difference was night and day.... You want to play a 1080p movie in Windows 7 Media Center while you page through some other film offerings in MediaBrowser? The menus are smooth as butter. You want to watch HD television with the program guide overlayed on the TV stream without graphics slowdowns? Yeah, not a problem. The card delivers.

- Quieter than you would think. The active cooling on the card initially had me concerned about the decibels it might put out, but now that the card is installed, the fan on this EVGA part is whisper quiet. I can't hear it over the sound of my hard drives.

- Good enough for modest gaming, if that's your thing. People who compare this budget Fermi model to graphics cards meant for gamers pretty much miss the point of a card like this. It's meant to be sandwiched into a tiny HTPC case, where it can push out some decent graphical horsepower through a digital output without using a lot of electricity and without generating a lot of heat. If you need a giant, full-sized PCI-E card that will take up a square foot of space in your computer case so you can get 200 FPS and pwn noobs in Call of Duty 11: Duty Harder, or something, then look elsewhere. This card is not for you. Also, that's your mom calling you. Dinner is ready. But if you have light gaming needs and tend to play older games, like World of Warcraft, then the GT 430 has you covered. I'm at 1920 x 1080 resolution at the highest detail settings with no slowdown. Life is good.

- Made by EVGA. For the uninitiated, the thinking is usually that one company's implementation of an Nvidia reference design is similar if not exactly the same as another company's, so it doesn't really matter what name is on the card, just buy whatever's cheapest. But believe me, the company does matter. EVGA is one of the more established video card companies out there at this point, and my own experience with them in the past is that they have stood by their products in case of trouble and are fast to honor their rebates. In fact, I got a rebate offer with this very card, and after filling out the information on their website, the company offers to expedite the rebate process for a nominal ($2) fee, so you get your money back in week or so instead of half a year. How great is that?

- Nvidia driver support. You download one driver file from nvidia.com and that's it. The installation is automated and painless, and the drivers support a wide range of Nvidia products. There's no drama. Compare and contrast with ATI's infamously poor driver support, where the company will often sneakily disable features on older cards that were working fine with the older drivers, or will inadvertently introduce or even reintroduce bugs serious enough to crash your computer. My subjective opinion is that their driver support has matured and gotten a little better, but it's still just plain bad. Every time ATI releases a new set of Catalyst drivers, it's like a war crime. As somebody with a junk drawer filled with a decade's worth of poorly-supported ATI TV tuners and graphics cards, it was definitely a headache I wanted to avoid this time around. If you're getting tired of all the nonsense and are taking 5xxx-series ATI cards off the table as a viable option for an HTPC build, that leaves you with just one good, affordable alternative, and it's this card.

CONS:

- The card is meant to have a small footprint, and occupy one PCI-E slot without hogging all the other slots on the motherboard. But in my setup, the heatsink fan on the video card is perilously close (1/4") to a neighboring PCI slot, which itself has a TV tuner card in it. Yeah, everything physically fits in the case, but there could be some concerns with heat when you have two cards that close to each other. I installed a small intake fan to push more air into the PCI bay as a little insurance.

- A minor gripe, but the box was a little light. No adapters, no driver CD, no nothing. It was just the card. I realize most customers are not going to use all that stuff, but throw us a bone here. Throw in an HDMI cable to sweeten the deal. Something. Anything.

I hate to end with the "CONS" because it gives the impression that there's something wrong with the card that should somehow factor into a buying decision. But the fact of the matter is there really is nothing wrong with this card at all. It's pretty much as good as it gets for new media PC builds. If you're assembling an HTPC, it should most certainly be on your list of components to buy. Read more ›

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Go ahead and buy it! January 17, 2011

By Mattress Man

Amazon Verified Purchase

-MY THOUGHTS-
This is a very impressive graphics card for the price here. Although, I expected a bigger boost in performance in my computer. I was mislead into thinking that the GPU would affect how fast I can edit photos and what not, but this is not so. I got this so my computer could be faster in things like Corel Painter Sketch Pad and Corel Videostudio Pro X3. This is a little bit faster than my old ATI Radeon 3200 on-board graphics. These applications are more CPU intensive though. I did not know this when I bought the card and so I was a little unimpressed with how fast it was. This card is definitely made for gaming. I'm not a huge gamer, but I might get into it. The reason why I like it so much and have kept it is because it is virtually future-proof. It is 3D ready and is very good for gaming. It will definitely help me in the future if I want to do these things.

-THE PRODUCT-
This is a high quality card. It runs on very low power (I run it on a stock 300 watt power supply). It still plays nice with my system. You can drive nearly every monitor out there with three outputs. It is very compact, it could fit in every mini-tower or tower on the market. Using the EVGA Precision software I could monitor the temperature and it ran at an average of around 30 degrees Celsius, which is like ice-cold for graphics cards. It produces very high-quality picture and I am very impressed with it. I recommend not using the drivers that come on the EVGA disc. Just go on the nVidia website and get the latest one. The control center is very helpful, I recommend spending some time with it. This is a great card made by a great company....

-BOTTOM LINE-
If your computer is more than eight years old and you want to play new games and edit things, you should probably do a complete overhaul.
If your computer is three years old or newer and it is getting sluggish on screen and isn't using your monitor to its full potential, GET THIS!!!!!
If you are a casual gamer and with pretty good hardware but have a crappy GPU, GET THIS!!!!!
If you are looking to edit things and design things faster, check into a better processor and/or memory. That is the more expensive solution, but it's the right one. The same goes for gamers.
At this price with a [...], go for it. Buy it now!
Hope I could help!

-UPDATE-
I recently started gaming with this GPU. I have played NFS Hot Pursuit and CoD: Modern Warfare. It performed well for a $70 GPU, but it is definitely an entry-level unit. I used Fraps and recorded framerates. Average for Hot Pursuit: 33 fps (frames per second) Average for Modern Warfare: 35 fps. This is acceptable for me. It doesn't lag often and even when it does it's not that bad. I would recommend getting a higher-end card if you are a hard-core gamer and are running Crysis 2 or something else super-intensive. Read more ›

46 of 50 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Nice, but beware. October 23, 2010

By F. J. Roman

Amazon Verified Purchase

I have been using this nice, little but powerful, video/graphics card for just a week. It works very nicely with my old, and not so powerful Dell computer.

The Evga GeForce GT 430 works great with the CRPG games I play. Examples of these games are the Medieval series, Oblivion, The Witcher, etc. I have not tried it on any of the new games that require higher end video cards.

You might be wondering why I wrote "but beware." I will explain.

- Nvidia's website clearly show the card needs at least 300 watts to run properly (recommended).
- However, none of the websites I visited (Nvidia included)looking for information and/or reviews regarding this video card offered you what I consider a critical piece of information about the card.
- When I received the card, and before I opened the box, I decided to read every bit of information to make sure my computer and the card are compatible.
- Sure enough, I found the one piece of information none of the websites I looked at included.
- The Evga GeForce GT 430 needs at least 22 amps per 12-volt rail.
- I got lucky because after opening my computer, looking at information on the power source, and surfing the net for formulas to find out the amps for my computer, I found that my computer has or produces exactly 22 amps per 12-volt rail.

Summary: Very nice, little but powerful, card. Not the top of the line as far as power is concerned, but good enough for the common gamer who owns a non-gaming computer.

P.S. - Thanks to Amazon for letting me return the card I ordered before this one (Evga GeForce GTS 450). Great customer support!