Palit GeForce GT 1030 2GB DDR4 Graphics Card is powered by the award-winning NVIDIA Pascal architecture, accelerates your entire PC experience. Its powerful graphics engine and state-of-the-art technologies provide a performance upgrade to drive today's most demanding PC applications. You can do it all. Video editing. Gaming. Transforming your pictures at HD resolutions. This powerful card lets you do it all faster. Palit GeForce GT 1030 comes with all the performance goodness of GeForce Experience. This is the gateway to great PC gaming, giving you industry-leading NVIDIA drivers for optimal performance and best-in-class stability—all with one-click convenience. ThunderMaster is a utility program for the graphics card under Windows and provides you to boost the performance of the graphics card and monitor the GPU information, which will only function correctly in conjunction with your new graphics adapter.
Palit GeForce GT 1030 2GB DDR4 Review
Gigabyte sent over its GeForce GT 1030 Low Profile 2G to represent Nvidia’s latest addition. The card ships with a full-sized slot bracket in place, but it includes a half-height bracket for slim enclosures as well. Although our sample is actively cooled, Gigabyte also sells a passive model sporting the same clock rates. Low-profile
and passively-cooled? Yup.
Palit GeForce GT 1030 TDP is a mere 30W, so we can already guess that power consumption, thermals, and acoustics will be some of this board’s advantages over the competition. But can it keep up in our benchmark suite? After all, that’s what determines whether the GT 1030 succeeds GT 730 in our list of gaming graphics cards.
GeForce GT 1030 utilizes an all-new graphics processor called GP108, composed of 1.8 billion transistors. It’s a teeny thing at just 70mm², thanks to the same 14nm FinFET process used to manufacture GP107. Compare that to GeForce GT 730’s GK208 chip with 1.02 billion transistors in an 84mm² die. Or how about the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, which we’re making the Palit GeForce GT 1030 battle in today’s benchmarks? That card’s GM107 GPU has a similar transistor count as GP108, but in a 148mm² die, owing to its 28nm manufacturing process.
Here’s the thing, though: whereas GeForce GTX 750 Ti employs five Streaming Multiprocessors, GT 1030 comes equipped with three. Given 128 CUDA cores per SM/SMM in the Pascal and Maxwell architectures, that’s 384 cores for GT 1030 and 640 for GTX 750 Ti. Both designs also expose eight texture units per SM, totaling 24 on GeForce GT 1030, while GTX 750 Ti gets 40. The two GPUs feature a pair of ROP partitions, giving you up to 16 32-bit integer pixels per clock. However, those partitions are aligned with 256KB slices of L2 cache on GP108 and 1MB slices of L2 on GM107. That means Palit GeForce GT 1030 includes 512KB L2 total—a big reduction from GTX 750 Ti’s 2MB. And whereas GeForce GTX 750 Ti utilizes two 64-bit memory controllers, GT 1030’s specs break the memory bus down into a pair of 32-bit controllers, adding up to a 64-bit interface. That’s a lot of lost resources for a ~4% difference in complexity.
Nvidia goes a long way to overcoming those deficits in Palit GeForce GT 1030 with higher clock rates. Our sample employs a 1227 MHz base frequency and a typical GPU Boost rating of 1468 MHz. In contrast, GeForce GTX 750 Ti starts at 1020 MHz and boosts just slightly to 1085 MHz. Of course, a 64-bit aggregate memory bus cripples GT 1030’s peak bandwidth to 48 GB/s using 6 Gb/s GDDR5; GTX 750 Ti’s wider interface facilitates up to 86.4 GB/s.
In the end, GP108 offers a much higher pixel fill rate than GK208 (19.8 GP/s vs. 7.2 GP/s). Its texture rate is much greater, too (29.8 GT/s vs. 14.4 GT/s). Further, Nvidia says that the work it did to enable Pascal’s aggressive clock rates and proper asynchronous compute support via dynamic load balancing added to the transistor budget. Palit GeForce GT 1030 uses a complete GP108 processor—there are no disabled resources waiting to be switched on. It’s just a much denser GPU than GK208.
Palit GeForce GT 1030 competition from AMD lands somewhere between GM107 and GK208. Its Radeon RX 550 is a little more expensive (~$85) and slightly more power-hungry (50W). We’ve seen low-profile and “single-slot” versions, but not both. Nothing with passive cooling, either. On the other hand, you get 512 Stream processors, 32 texture units, and 16 ROPs in a 2.2 billion-transistor Polaris 12 GPU. That translates to a pixel fill rate of 17.6 GP/s and a texturing rate of 35.2 GT/s. Faster 7 Gb/s GDDR5 modules on a wider 128-bit memory bus give AMD a 233% theoretical bandwidth advantage, too.
And yet, Nvidia tells us its GeForce GT 1030 should trade blows with AMD’s pricier solution. If that turns out to be true, it’d be quite an achievement for a smaller and simpler graphics card able to fit into PCs that might not accommodate a Radeon RX 550.
