nVidia Geforce GT430 Review

While we know that the nVidia GT430 is a budget card aimed at a cost conscious user group, we don't feel that £65 inc vat makes for a sound purchase. Instead of being in the same category as the HD5500 series, it is having to contend with the excellent HD5670, which as we have seen, makes for a very one sided outcome.

This is a problem that nVidia is facing in this sector, AMD's aggressive pricing. With a 512MB HD5670 available for £60 inc vat it becomes extremely hard to recommend the GT430, on any level.

On the plus side, the Zotac card is well built and looks rather fetching with the brightly coloured orange fan. Also, it is a single slot solution, which is always more appealing for media systems.

Sadly for its board partners, on a performance level, the Radeon HD 5670 walks all over nVidia's GT430.

Not only that, but for media fanatics the Radeon HD 5670 is a superior solution in regards to image quality, as the HQV Benchmark testing verifies. nVidia has made improvements with its drivers for higher-end cards, but the lower-end GT430 seems to have issues with a few of the tests, such as Stadium 2:2 and Luminance Frequency bands. It's worth pointing out that this isn't the case with the GTS450 or GTX460.

Gaming on the GT430 is a limited experience, even at 720p with modest settings. Sure, if you are used to Intel onboard graphics then it will be a step up, but bear in mind that Intel isn't asking you to part with an additional £65.

So, after living with this card for several days, what's our conclusion?  The GT430 is a very mundane card – significantly hampered by a massive pricing error.  nVidia needs to instruct its partners to drop the price below £50 before it would become even remotely worth considering as a DX11 proposition.

Given the huge success we had in overclocking Zotac's card, we are utterly confused as to why nVidia has told its partners to ship at these clocks. It could be that Zotac has a better PCB/cooling solution than its competitors, which allows for higher overclocking than a run-of-the-mill GT430, but KitGuru believes that the clock speeds and pricing make it currently very undesirable.

KitGuru says: The pricing of nVidia's GT430 is all wrong when you look at the relative performance levels. nVidia's GT430 seems to be priced almost 40% higher than cards like the Radeon HD 5550, but it actually steps into the ring against the Radeon HD 5670 and the result is completely one sided. Unless nVidia can work some magic and get the street price of the GT430 down closer to £45 in the next couple of weeks, it will sell very few of these cards. That said, all of the initial reviews will have been published by then and so there's is no easy way to re-build momentum even if the price is corrected. What can we say?  We were hoping for so much more.

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