Following on from KitGuru's revelations about the affordable GT640 yesterday, we're now able to bring you a little more about nVidia's mass-market Kepler offerings. Today it is the turn of the GT 630, which will be aimed squarely at customers who don't want to spend more than £500 on a PC. KitGuru pulls on surgeon's gloves and prepares to dissect the available info.
So much of the ink written about graphics relates to the high end, it's overwhelming.
At the same time, if you combine ‘integrated graphics' with ‘simple/cheap graphics card', then you are describing the vast majority of the market.
While not sexy, the low end is really where the battles for major orders are fought between the MNC teams. For this market, MNC means ‘Multi National Corporations' and we're talking the likes of Dell, Acer and (surprisingly) HP. Both AMD and nVidia have small armies dedicated to making sure that when an MNC wants to build 200,000 new PCs for July, that the ‘right card' has been selected. Deals are done and the GT 630 is the kind of product being promoted. [We say surprising for HP, cos if memory serves – didn't their CEO claim to be pulling out of the desktop hardware business a while back? – Ed]
With 96 CUDA cores to its name, the GeForce GT 630 makes up for a lack of parallelism by pushing the GPU clock up to 810MHz.
Armed with 1GB of GDDR memory (either 3 or 5 – depending on which price point your preferred supplier wants to hit), it uses the lower-cost/easier-to-wire 128-bt memory interface that some of the GT 640 cards share.
The similarities with yesterday's GT 640 announcement continue with the physical size. If you remember Bryan Del Rizzo, President of the KFC (Kepler Fan Club) was packing 5.7″ for the mid-range – and this card is the same.
Power draw is a miserly 65 watts and it promises to deliver the best Blu-Ray quality to date and it has tick boxes for PhysX, DX11 and OpenGL 4.2
KitGuru says: While everyone will be ogling the 680 and 690 cards, the real world will be buying GT 630 and 640 graphics.
Comment below or in the KitGuru forums.