Nvidia launched the GT 1030 GDDR5 on 17 May, 2017. It is a low profile, entry level graphics card which was made by Nvidia as a Display Adaptor not for other purposes. So you can understand that this Graphics card is going to allow you play at max settings but still would it be able to game at low settings to give you 60 FPS. The GT 1030 was released at the launch price of $70 and today you can get it for about $30 - $50 on the used market.
The GT 1030 is a low profile display Card which was only meant for being used as a display adaptor. It is build on a 14 nm Process, this Graphics card support the DX12 means every game will run on it after all it is from the Second latest Graphics Card Series from Nvidia. It has different versions with different memory types - one with GDDR5 and other with GDDR4 and the GDDR4 one is not even half as fast as the GDDR5 one and still costs the same, so stay away from the GDDR4 module. The Gt 1030 GDDR5 comes with a Base Clock Frequency of 1227 MHz and Boost Clock up to 1468 MHz. It has 384 Cuda Cores which help in sharpening the graphics and giving you a realistic gaming feel and it has the Memory speed of 3000 MHz and has 2 memory size variants - one 2 GB GDDR5 and other is 4 GB GDDR5, there would be no difference in the performance but the 4 GB one would be a bit more costly and will come with more Video Memory. The GT 1030 has Memory Width of 64-bits and Video Memory Speed or Memory Bandwidth of 48 GB/s.
The Maximum resolution it can support is 8K or 7680x4320p at 60 Hz and you can also use dual monitor with this Card. It has the TDP of 30 W and a good quality 300 W Power Supply Unit would be enough for it. It supports the PCle 3.0.
For complete Information, go view the official site of
NVIDIA
I bought a GT 1030 GDDR5 2 GB variant from MSI for about $85 ( yeah the prices are too much here ), this Graphics Card is not even made for gaming yet it was able to allow me game at 720p @30-45FPS at mid setting. Even thought today there are Graphics card like
Radeon RX 570 which costs just $50 more but will provide you like 3 times the performance, should you buy it? Or you just want to know what it performs like so you can check it out.
I have paired the GT 1030 GDDR5 2 GB variant with an
AMD Ryzen 3 1200 non-overclocked ( a Core i5 760 would be enough for it ) and 16 GB DDR4 RAM ( dual channel ) with Frequency of 2400 MHz. 5 games are played at 1280x720p Full HD resolution and on lowest settings.
As shown in this table, i got 60+ FPS in every game at 720 P lowest settings, the game play was very smooth and there were no bottlenecks in any game, if you want to play at higher graphical settings then you can go set the settings to high but you will get only 30+ FPS on 720 P resolution and do not think about going to Full HD resolution as at even in GPU demanding games you would get only 30 FPS on low and you can think what will happen on higher settings. After all, this card was only made for video watching and internet browsing which it performs very well.
So at the end, today buying such a card is not good because of the newer APU's AMD launched and also the old APU like
Ryzen 3 2200G performs somewhat like it and buying the APU's would be better as they GPU and CPU together and you have to purchase CPU's separately for GT 1030. To upgrade, you would have to buy a new GPU and CPU which will cost you more and to upgrade your APU PC, you just need to put in a GPU. It is all up to you what to buy at the the end but i will prefer the R3 2200g more than GT 1030.
