Final Words & Conclusion

The Verdict

The GeForce GT 430 surely offers a lot of features for money, we do feel though that this product should have gotten more teeth, much like many other products from the Fermi family. Being way late to market you'd expect NVIDIA to show up with something more aggressive, but that's just not happening; now in the lower segment of their DX11 cards as well, we expect bigger steps NVIDIA ...

First I want to mention that our entire benchmark suite is focused on performance graphics and measurements. We follow guidelines and a testing policy that was not at all suited for a card in the low end of the spectrum as the image quality settings are way too high, hence the low numbers in this review. This means you at home will use (forfeit) lower image quality settings, and thus gain performance. Our benchmarks merely show and indicate performance ranked against other cards.

Now, despite the fact we certainly would have appreciated more gaming performance we do feel that the GT 430 is a versatile card. If you do not have a lot of money to spend, then you can game on the card at 1280x1024 reasonably well. Depending on how GPU intensive the game is, you'll need to weigh it up for yourself what image quality settings you can apply.

Competition wise, what surprised us is NVIDIA can't compete even remotely close with the 80 EUR / 100 USD costing Radeon HD 5670 1024 MB, and from that perspective the gaming performance of the GeForce GT 430 is disappointing, the GT 430 competes with the Radeon HD 5570 at best. See, shaders wise ATI has 400 Shader processors on their boards.

Now, NVIDIA's architecture induces a different accounting of stream processors from ATI stream processors, which can contain 5 instructions; VEC5. Divide by 5 the raw number of stream processors advertised for ATI GPUs to get a number that allows comparison with those given by NVIDIA. VEC5 would mean roughly equal to 80 of NVIDIA's shader processors for the GT 430. The trick is though that on the 5670 ATI simply achieves higher effective data rates with GDDR5 memory, opening up a can of memory bandwidth allowing for much higher framerates.

The reality is also that it isn't all about gaming, we think the GT 430 is an excellent multi-media graphics adapter for a work PC where you need some content accelerated, but most of all we think the GT 430 is a great Digital Media and Home Theater PC card. The latest video processor embedded into the GPU allows for Full HD (1080P) content decoding and acceleration. Next to that you'll have 96 shader processors at your disposal, and with software like Media Player Classic Home Cinema edition (download here) you can utilize the shaders to manage some complex image sharpening or whatever feature your performance level can handle. And that really helps out. GeForce GT 430 also supports 3D output to any compatible large screen television through HDMI 1.4 at bit rates up to 65Mbps. GeForce GT 430 supports high definition 24-bit multi-channel audio up to 192 KHz, and lossless DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD audio bitstreaming, nice features for a product in this price range, sure.

Other than that, the card doesn't consume heaps of power and is very silent. If the GeForce GT 430 meets your generic PC usage and/or HTPC requirements then sure, go for it. Gaming wise your money simply is better invested in a Radeon HD 5670 with 1024 MB gDDR5 memory, features wise with HDMI 1.4a bringing 3D Stereo support, the excellent video processor and being CUDA backed, it might be an interesting contender.

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