ASUS ENGT430 Review

ccokeman - October 11, 2010
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Testing:

Testing of this version of NVIDIA's Fermi architecture, in the form of the ASUS ENGT430, will consist of running the card through the OverclockersClub.com suite of games and synthetic benchmarks. This will test the performance against many popular competitors. Comparisons will be made to cards of equal and greater capabilities to show where it falls on the performance ladder. The games used are some of today's newest and most popular titles to give you an idea on how the cards perform relative to each other. The system specifications will remain the same throughout the testing. No adjustment will be made to the respective control panels during the testing with the exception of the 3DMark Vantage testing where PhysX will be disabled in the NVIDIA control panel. I will test the card at stock speeds, then overclocked in order to see how much additional performance is available and to determine if it can run with the current fastest single GPU cards in its market segment. The drivers used in this test will be the 10.7 Catalyst drivers for ATI and 260.77 Forceware drivers for the NVIDIA based cards including the GT430. Tests will be conducted at both stock and overclocked settings to gauge performance when an increase in clock speed is applied.

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 200x18 3.6Ghz
Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P SE 1366
Motherboard: MSI X58 Eclipse SLI
Memory: Mushkin 996805 Redline PC312800 6-8-6-24 1600MHz
Video Card(s): ASUS ENGT430
Power Supply: Mushkin 1000 watt Joule Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: LG DVD-RW
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Case: Cooler Master Stacker 810

Comparison Boards:

Inno3D GT 220
Nvidia 210
ATI HD 5570
ATI HD 5550
Sapphire HD 5450

Overclocking:

ASUS ENGT430 866/1732/1800Mhz

It has seemed that as NVIDIA has built cards to fill the lower price brackets, that these cards seem to come with some pretty decent overclocking headroom right out of the box. The GT430 is no exception to this rule. Using ASUS Smart Doctor software I was only initially able to bump the clock speeds up to 800Mhz on the fixed function units and 1600Mhz on the CUDA cores. So, I went back to my favorite MSI Afterburner utility and promptly jumped up to 860+ MHz. That did not seem to sit real well so I went rummaging around in the settings of the Smart Doctor software and found a check box to enhance the clock speed limits. Checking this box opened up the clock speed limits so I was able to use this utility for the rest of my overclocking testing to manipulate the clock speeds on the memory and core clock speeds. Individual benchmarks would pass at different clock speeds as high as 880Mhz but the final clock speeds were 866MHz on the fixed units, 1732MHz on the CUDA cores and 900MHz on the GDDR3 memory. These increases on a percentage basis are equal to almost 24% on the cores and 12.5% on the memory. These increases offer up significant gains in the games tested allowing smooth game play in some games where otherwise, the FPS would be marginal.

Maximum Clock Speeds:

MSI's Kombuster utility was used to test stability and to put a constant load on the GPU for the purposes of testing maximum power draw and temperatures. The stability test was used to find a range of settings that are stable through a 15 minute run at 1920 x 1200 8xAA. The reported clock speeds are those that proved stable over a 15 minute test at 1920 x 1200, 8x AA and the run through the benchmarks suite.