Evga GeForce GT 430 1 GB DDR3 PCI-Express 2.0 Graphics Card 01G-P3-1430-LR

Evga GeForce GT 430 1 GB DDR3 PCI-Express 2.0 Graphics Card 01G-P3-1430-LR

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.