NVIDIA pushed out a slower GeForce GT 1030 with DDR4

These days, NVIDIA doesn't really pull a lot of attention to its lower-end offerings. These cards are a little step up versus onboard solutions but aren't really suitable for a quality gaming experience. One interesting snippet of news that comes across our desk today is that NVIDIA silently rolled out a slower GeForce GT 1030 with DDR4 memory.

This is the first time we're seeing DDR4 on video cards. Previously, low-end cards used DDR3 instead of the more expensive GDDR5 but it seems a switch to DDR4 is going on right now. The new GeForce GT 1030 cards with DDR4 memory have lower base, Boost, and memory frequencies than the GDDR5 models. Additionally, they have a TDP of just 20W instead of 30W. Due to the slower memory, the memory bandwidth takes a very big cut:

In addition to slower-clocked DDR4 VRAM, the GT 1030 DDR4’s core clocks have also been reduced, though the exact boost clocks differ between custom boards. The end result of 2100Mbps DDR4 from 6008Mbps GDDR5 does reduce the bandwidth from around 48 GB/s to 16.8 GB/s, though with no change to memory size and bus width. It appears that the DDR4 variants are also lower power, with a 20W TDP as opposed to 30W.

It's not exactly clear how much slower these models are versus the older GDDR5 versions.



Via: AnandTech