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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.
ekk, same price as a HD5670, thats a bit of a mess.
Disaster, the card doesnt seem to have much going for it, certainly not at that price.
Why not make it passively cooled and the same price as a HD5500 series card? like 40 quid.
Very highly overpriced. as a media card it seems decent as the HQV testing shows, but again the HD5670 is better. Dont think it has anything really to sell it. price needs to be 40-50 quid.
They all need to passively cooled and under £50. not sure what they are thinking. performance is very poor.
Very honest, and I like to see KG not hiding behind some silly comments. its a poor board. GTX460 seems to be the only no brainer this time around.
Well this is very open. I am a bit sick seeing 9/10s on this site, I doubt this review will make you popular with nvidia fans, but It is a tough card to recommend. I think even the 5570 si a better card. at least its passively cooled too !
I have read this and there was certainly no quarter drawn 🙂
It isn’t a poor card, power consumption is good and noise levels are decent.
My points are this and its been said before.
1: price needs to put it into the RIGHT CATEGORY! £45 inc vat
2: passively cooled, all solutions (or see point 3)
3: non passive cooled solutions need the clocks raised much higher to help with gaming.
I know people say its a ‘media card’ but come on, even people who are media fanatics, still play the odd title at 720p. this card even struggles at that, which is acceptable for 45 quid, not 65. HD5670 is a decent media gaming card, so this has to be as well, or else the price has to change. fact.
10/10 review. dig the honesty. product sucks. There are loads of cards in this price sector which deliver better performance. point proven today.
Maybe they can;t drop the price more, but this is destined to fail. loads of threads up across the net already. its only decent for encoding some files. but very few media people care less with even powerful low end CPU’s today.
Well this article is useless as it it compares against the wrong ATI graphics card…
The Nvidia GT430 is priced at about $79 (£51) and so competes with the ATI 5550 which would look much more interesting, and a Best buy rating !
bollocks.
This is the common pricing online. learn to count http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-239-AS&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1863
JCB has been on the LSD 🙂
The whole point of this article is that the 430 SHOULD be £sub 50 but its £65-70!
Might be cheaper in america but it sure as shit aint in the UK.
Maybe if I got a flight to New York, it might work out at £50, but id need to get a flight for £3 before it would be worth my time.
All the prices today in the UK are 65 to 75 quid in the uk. ive not seen any decent makes for close to 50 quid. at 70 quid for the asus card, thats 5 less than a 1gb HD5670 ! well worth a 6 month wait for this crap.
i wait for the nexgenartion cards