Active or better passive cooling? The GeForce GT 1030 in a practical comparison!

Gigabyte GT 1030 Low Profile and Low Profile Silent We have deliberately opted for the low-profile form factor, as this type of card is likely to be used mainly in the area of small and very small PCs. And this is exactly where we will be... The Gigabyte GT 1030 Low Profile The active card is a whole 15.0 cm long (from the outside of the slot panel to the end of the cooler) and 6.5 cm high (from top board slot to top edge cooler). The depth is 1.7 cm and is... Battlefield 1 (DX12) In our launch review of the AMD Radeon RX 550 2 GB we had already tested Battlefield 1 with the lowest quality settings - always hoping to play it in a resolution with 1920 x 1080 pixels. Dota 2 (volcano) The results from our launch article for the Radeon 550X had already given us an approximate presentation of what with such small cards at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and medium quality settings... Voltages and temperatures Let's first look at the voltage curve in the gaming loop. both cards act almost identically and the voltage levels under load after heating to values between 0.96 and 0.98 volts. However, if you... Temperature curve and clock rates The warm-up phase of both cards could not be more different, but the final result of both cards is very similar. In no case will the temperature rise above 65 or 66 °C. The passive card reaches in the Gam... Summary Given the resource disadvantages of the GeForce GT 1030 compared to the Radeon RX 550, the smallest current Nvidia card with the GP108 actually compensates for these deficits quite well. In older, DirectX9 and DirectX11 based...

Battlefield 1 (DX12)

In our launch review of the AMD Radeon RX 550 2 GB we had already tested Battlefield 1 with the lowest quality settings – always hoping to get it playable in a resolution with 1920 x 1080 pixels. Sure, it worked, but the graphics looked so modest that we decided to test it today with 1280 x 720 pixels and slightly better graphics options (middle details):

Despite the higher graphics quality, the game is really playable if you can make friends with the slightly lower resolution. The bottom line is that it not only looks better, but feels much smoother. Nevertheless, the GT 1030 is at the end of the test field and can only beat Intel integrated graphics.

However, if we then take back the graphic quality in order to reach playable frame rates in 1920 x 1080 pixels, then it flickers mainly on barbed wire fences for god-mercy and everything else looks rather flat and extremely unappetizing. However, if you increase the graphics quality, there are jerks and still images.

Although the GeForce GT 1030 achieves a higher minimum frame rate than the old GTX 750 TI, the average frame rate is lower than the former mid-range card from 2014. It's also disappointing that AMD's Radeon RX 550 is almost 24% faster here! We would have expected a similar performance, but it also shows how well GCN performs on DirectX12 and on low-end platforms.

Doom (volcano)

Let's move on to Doom and Volcano. Doom is also very clearly GPU-limited, similar to Battlefield 1. But instead of using DirectX12, we are now testing with the Volcano API.

AMD's GCN usually works very well in Doom and this dominance is absolutely striking at 1280 x 720 pixels with the quality one-cell "medium": the Radeon RX 550 4 GB is a whopping 84% faster than the GeForce GT 1030! Even the old GeForce GTX 750 TI still has an astonishing 32% lead in our FPS measurement of the average frame rate. It's only possible to get schelchter with Intel's integrated graphics in the form of the HD 530 in the Core i3-6320.

If you increase the resolution and reduce the graphical details, the order of the other cards shifts a bit and also the Radeon RX 550 has to leave some springs and even let the more acti ERR RX 460 pass by. For the GeForce GT 1030, however, it is once again important to practice humiliating modesty, even if it can now narrowly overtake the three-year-old GTX 750 Ti. Progress is somehow different.